


The Unquiet Grave

by LiaS0



Category: Hannibal (TV), Hannibal Lecter Series - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst, But not the kind of empath you'd expect, Dark Will Graham, Empath Will Graham, Gaslighting, Hannibal is a Cannibal, Idk if this whole tag thing is really working out you'll have to tell me, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, Manipulative Hannibal, Mystery, Obsessive Will Graham, Possessive Hannibal, Psychologists & Psychiatrists, Romance, Slow Burn, Someone Help Will Graham, Will Graham may just find out
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-06-05
Updated: 2017-09-25
Packaged: 2018-11-09 07:32:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 13
Words: 55,829
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11099862
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LiaS0/pseuds/LiaS0
Summary: Empath AU: Dreamers, Seers, FeelersWill Graham has always been able to read minds. That is why he is part of a special organization within the FBI: The Empath Behavioral Analysis Unit, or EBAU for short. As an empath, he is at the government's disposal the hunt down the country's most terrifying of killers, all the while maintaining the barriers within his own mind. After a dangerous run-in with the notorious Minnesota Shrike, he is put on probation, tasked with being babysat by a therapist to better ensure his mental stability.Hannibal Lecter, babysitter, isn't like other neurotypicals, though. Will can't read him the way he can anyone else. On his best of days, he'd almost call the good doctor interesting.Romance, angst, thriller, mystery, slow burn, fantasy, obsession, and a disenchanted Will Graham.





	1. With Quiet Hands We Touch

**Author's Note:**

  * For [EmilyElm](https://archiveofourown.org/users/EmilyElm/gifts).



Chapter 1:

            Will Graham waits alone by the SUV until he’s told that it’s alright for him to enter the crime scene.

            Jack Crawford’s job is to make sure it’s a ‘safe space’ for Will to enter, and no matter how many times Will explains that that makes no fucking sense, the rules remain. Empaths on the scene of a fresh crime have a tendency to vomit, to collapse from the sensations, and no one is going to take a risk with him, no matter how resilient he is. While a normal Seer-empath boasts an ability to see the realities that occur around them, a Feeler can touch and gain impressions from tactile feel, and a Dreamer can recreate, Will Graham is a special blend of all three, the shining star of the Empath-Behavioral-Analysis-Unit. A rare, somewhat mentally stable E-3. They don’t want him tarnished, not when he’s so damn good at what he does.

            If he wasn’t so strung out, he’d have felt almost cherished at the thought they gave him, to cradle him like a fragile little teacup meant only for the best of after dinner sit-downs over lady fingers and a cup of French press.

            He rubs his palms together, stares down at his familiar, worn pair of standard, FBI-edition leather gloves. They block the sensations of touch, keep the worst of the world at bay. They’ve been his constant companions for the last five years, helped him through the thick of things. There is a fray on one of the seams, and he notes that it’ll need fixed soon. It wouldn’t do for a seam to come undone and accidentally expose him to anything.

            When he hears footsteps, he glances to them, then to the hands clenched into fists swaying beside a stiff spine and a taut stance. It’s not a pretty crime scene, and Will can see it before he’s even been inside.

            “How many?” he asks.

            “Just the wife, but it’s bad. RA and daughter are missing.”

            RA and daughter are missing. Will lets those words roll around in his mind, lets them settle. He can imagine the fear, the terror on her face as she’s hauled about, nothing more than the weight of her skin and her bones as she cries. He’s panicked, Will thinks, but he’s not stupid. He’s desperate, but he’ll still have fight in him.

            He stands up, adjusts his glasses and heads into the house.

            It is bad, just like Jack Crawford promised. Blood trails from the entryway towards the kitchen, and as he walks in he’s given wide, respectful berth. His regular team waits in the entry to the kitchen, and he notes Beverly’s grim smile of encouragement as he steps in and looks around, inhaling the tangy aftertaste of mortal terror and betrayal.

             The mother’s there, just like Jack promised. She lies in a pool of blood, throat cut open to expose everything within, and Will stares down at her for a time, studying her. Impressions of her life do not lay in her corpse, but the final moments of her death does. He hunches down, head tilted as he removes his glasses and studies her in sweeping, smooth motions. His gaze pauses on her throat, on her shoulder. He tastes pain, fear, fury, and a longing that claws so deep he wants to cry out with it.

            He steadfastly refuses.

            Instead, he meticulously removes his gloves and tucks them into his coat pocket, reaching down in order to grasp her shoulder and her neck, the spaces that seem to light up moreso than the rest of her, begging him to just _touch_.

            _It is all at once, a rushing, choking, cloying pain, the sensations rippling like the water right before a tidal wave. They twist, curl, red hot and furious, and blood pools around like rivers of hatred, of disdain._

Will ignores the sensations, the feeling of her death. It is a difficult thing to ignore, but he focuses instead on the feelings that surround her, that led to her final moments, the light ethereal that held death with such tender malevolence.

_You are nothing, but you will give me time. You will give me time, you will give me an escape, and the many years I’ve endured you, endured your cutting glances, your knowing stares will finally come to an end._

_It is time for you to come to an end. You’ve served your purpose. This is my design._

Will jerks back with a hiss of breath, and he stares down at her, pulling hands away quickly. The aftermath of her emotions, of _his_ emotions rings through each pulse of his heart, and he gulps in air as he looks around, trying to ground himself. The sink is a good place, and he stares at it until his breath can come without burning, until he can calm his steady heart.

            It doesn’t want to calm, though. Not when it’s found a trail.

            He sees it, glowing imprints of the one that no longer remains. Just as the Shrike placed hands upon his wife’s shoulder before he took her life, so too can Will see the glowing imprints of a hand to the edge of the sink, dragging along the counter before making its way to the doorway just across from them, leading outside.

            Will knows where to go.

            He follows the trail, stumbling over a fallen rain boot before catching himself, hands fumbling with the doorknob until he’s outside, gulping in the fresh afternoon air of fall, cold and rejuvenating in his lungs. He inhales the trail, looks around and spies that same glow, that same light that moves first left than right. He bends down, touches his palm to the footprint, and like a jolt from touching a live wire, he senses purpose, determination. Alongside it, stumbling and whimpering, he senses mortal terror. The daughter is alive.

            _The daughter is alive_.

            He isn’t aware that he’s running until he slips down a small incline on fallen leaves and has to catch himself, fingers pressing to the earth. He senses the startled jump of a doe not an hour before, the slither of a snake through underbrush ten minutes ago, and his hands are up again, pumping as he stares at the golden trail, ignoring a shout in the distance, ignoring the sense that something terrible is going to happen.

            It’s two miles out before he finds what he’s looking for, and when he does relief is only the mildest of balms. The cabin has the same sense, the same aura, and he opens the door to it, pleased with the way the hinges do not squeak, do not betray him. He steps in, the air within just as fresh as the outside, and he knows this is no place that sits abandoned for too long. He sees the man’s essence on every surface, in every nook and cranny. He is here often, this place he’s made into a fortress.

            A creak upstairs distracts him, and he looks up to the sound of scuffling feet. There is a quiet, despairing sob, and he’s up the stairs, feet carrying him fast, breath puffing with a burning need before he rounds the corner and comes face-to-face with the man he’s tracked, the man he so easily found because _of course_ he’d find him when they were one in the same.

            “P-please,” the girl whimpers, and Will’s hands find their way to his gun, drawing it up to level at the man before him. His head is bowed, his mouth is moving, and when a hand shifts near her neck, Will Graham does not hesitate.

            First one, then two more. The Shrike does not fall back, merely wrenches his arm to the side, and blood spurts from her neck, an arc of color catching in the light from the window with a dazzling array. At the action, another two shots, then five more as he doesn’t seem to realize that he’s been shot, that people that have been shot should fall down and die. At the tenth round hitting his flesh, he finally manages to fall, body hitting the sturdy oak floor with the sound only a dead body can make.

            Will rushes to the girl, drops to his knees beside her. Blood gushes from her neck, pooling in a sickening design about her, and without thought he puts his hands to her neck, gripping tightly to try and staunch the flow.

            It is the wrong thing to do.

            He isn’t aware that he is screaming until the screams stop and his ears burn with the aftermath. Her skin is raw, and his skin is peeling back, blood gushing down his neck as each heartbeat takes them closer and closer to the end, to the place where time is nothing because they’re ultimately nothing. He can’t see, he can’t _see_ , and it isn’t until he’s wrenched away from her body that he realizes anyone else is even in the room.

            “Will, _Will_ ,” someone urges, and hands pat at his jacket, withdraw his gloves from his pocket. He isn’t aware of the actions though, merely the sensation of what it is to die and die afraid, terrified of the one you love most in the entire world. His breaths choke, are wrenched from him, and it isn’t until gloves are slid onto his shaking hands that he’s able to gain some semblance of control over himself.

            He curls into a ball on the floor where he shot Garrett Jacob Hobbs, and he presses his hands to his eyes as he sobs.

-

            He’s not allowed inside of Abigail Hobbs’ hospital room, so he sits outside. Beside him, Dr. Alana Bloom waits with him, as patient as a tulip bulb in winter.

            “You’re not in trouble,” she assures him, not for the first time.

            Will says nothing. His throat is hoarse from the screaming.

            “Your quick actions saved her life, and no one is going to ignore that. No matter what happens, you saved her life.”

            “I felt him die,” Will manages after a prolonged sort of quiet that rubs against his skin wrong. He rubs his neck, studies an ugly black scuff mark on the tiled floor. “I can feel everyone dying inside of this hospital.”

            “Do you need your medicine?”

            He shakes his head, slumps further in his chair. The medicine quiets things, but it makes him lethargic, too numb to function right. Each blink of his eyelids is a gunshot, each breath a jerk of shoulders as Garrett Jacob Hobbs takes a hit.

            “He was a RA, and you did your job,” she says, and Will has to cling to those words. _You did your job_.

            “I did my job,” he says, and there is a bleak, sinister sneer to his lips.

            “I know being an empath isn’t easy –I’ll never know what you’re going through,” Alana says kindly. “Just know that you’re supported by everyone on your team, and we’re going to help you through this.”

            He wants to snort, to bite back with something snarky, but he can’t bring himself to. No matter what anyone says, from the Seer-empath he shared a room with for all thirteen years of his education to the Feeler-empath he trained with at the academy, Will Graham is utterly and painfully aware of just how not easy it is to be someone like him. Dr. Bloom says it to comfort herself just as much as she’s trying to comfort him. There’s no one in the world like Will Graham, and Will Graham fucking knows it.

            Long after Alana leaves, he stands up, shrugs his coat on and heads for the exit, gloves tugged taut over fingertips that still recall the feeling of Abigail Hobbs’ blood.

-

            He’s found a week later at his home in Wolf Trap, blinds closed and dogs roaming restlessly in the front room. He lays sprawled alongside a boat motor, gloves on, and he tinkers with it, fumbling over the feeling of a faulty fan and a piss poor belt.

            “I finished the paperwork on the case,” Jack says, sitting down at Will’s desk. He doesn’t ask before he sits, and Will doesn’t offer.

            “Good.”

            “Despite you not following empath protocol, you’re still in active duty. The director was more than willing to be understanding about an E-3 losing themselves to the sensations and following those rather than the rules. She’s given an informal warning.”

            He grunts, puts his shoulder into the turning of a screw, pleased when it loosens and drops into his waiting palm.

            “I guess the question is whether or not you want to be back in active duty, Will,” Jack continues when he gets no reply. “No call, no e-mail; you’d might as well have dropped off of the face of the earth. How are you doing out here?”

            “Better question is how you’re doing without me,” Will replies, and he won’t look at Jack. He can already sense it in the air, a feeling of need, of words unsaid but wanting to be shared. He doesn’t want to go down that road. It’d been nice to only feel the base, pure needs of the dogs around him that want nothing more than his love. It’s been better therapy than whatever doctor is waiting for him at the bureau to evaluate his psyche, a walnut that cracks under pressure.

            “Make no mistake, we need you. I’ve already got another case with your name on it, but that’s nothing if your head’s not in the game.”

            Will holds back a smile that’s more of a gritting of teeth. His head’s never been in the game, too lost as it was in the thoughts of another, the ideals of someone just across the room. Jesus, he can’t even look at a person without seeing their heart’s desires, their thoughts laid bare, and Jack thinks he’s at some point been in the saddle, let alone faced the right direction?

            “You ever read what it does to a feeler to kill someone, Jack?” he asks.

            “I’ve read about it,” Jack says evenly. “I had to pass several courses before I was even considered for my position at the EBAU.”

            “They’re both the killer and the killed. It’s in their skin, their cells, their brain; a feeler once dropped dead, heart stopped after they killed someone in self-defense. A thinker has the sensation that they’re the ones being killed, and they can go into a coma. A seer has been said to have visions of their own death in the face of taking another’s life. With me-”

            “You got a mix of all three,” Jack finishes for him. “Dr. Bloom said you’re not coping well.”

            “I’m not fucking coping at all,” Will retorts. He sounds angry so that he doesn’t sound so god damn afraid. “I’m not…I’m not coping.”

            He’s not coping. In his dreams, he’s standing behind Abigail Hobbs, slitting her throat with a devilish hunger and a sadistic smile. When he wakes, he thinks that maybe he should just finish the job after all. He thinks of how his own neck felt, splitting open as hers did, and it quells the thought nicely. Sometimes he wakes and feels as though he’s dead, as though he never were.

            “She referred me to a doctor that has worked with empaths and comes highly recommended, Will,” Jack says. “I spoke with him, and he’s willing to talk to you, maybe help with some of the thoughts in your head.”

            “No therapists,” Will snaps.

            “If you just-”

            “Since I was five-years-old I’ve had doctors climbing in and out of my head, Jack,” Will warns him, and he pokes his head out from around the motor to scowl at his pant leg. “No therapists. I’ll come in on Monday.”

            Jack wants to argue, and Will glances to his shoulder, noting the tense set of it. This isn’t an easy conversation for Jack any more than it is for Will. Neither one of them share emotions well, let alone conveyed in a way others can wholly understand.

            “Thanks for coming,” he adds, to sound congenial. It’s also a dismissal.

            “If you’re not in by Monday, I’m sending the doctor to you,” Jack warns.

            It’s a fair warning, and Will’s silence shows his compliance. Jack sees himself out, and Will sets his tools down, laying sprawled out beside the motor, chest heaving with the thought of having to go out and _look_ at people after a week of blissful solitude. Buster crawls onto his chest, lays there, and he absentmindedly pets him, still gloved because if there’s one thing he’s learned in this world, it’s that even the pure emotions of a dog against his bare skin is enough to rend his mind in two.

-

            He shows up on Monday because he knows Jack’s threat is real. He’d scrounged through his closet, found his least wrinkled plaid, belt cinched tight because a week of bad eating habits –rather, of no eating habits –has dropped a few pounds off of him. In Jack’s office he accepts a file after he’s signed a form saying that he in no way blames EBAU for what happened, that he takes full responsibility for his actions.

            Then he sits in a room with other empaths somewhat like him and listens to them talk.

            A Feeler’s gloves ripped at a crime scene and he thought he’d been stabbed, leading to an anxiety attack that took him out of work for a week. Will listens to his bumbling mouth form words, taking them back to that moment, and in their own way everyone in the room is there with him, being stabbed as well. The Seers avoid looking at him, Dreamers try and hear the words and those alone, compartmentalizing their thoughts before they can become nightmares, and Will gnaws on his bottom lip, focusing on the tactile feel of his new gloves, issued to him after he showed Jack the ripped thread. No sense in having what happened to the guy three seats down happen to him. Not after he’d already had his own special blend of breakdowns.

            “Agent Graham, you recently returned after something similar,” the director prompts. “Would you like to share?”

            Although he doesn’t have to see a doctor, there is a Director of Empath Agents that has full reign of the empath program in the FBI, and he does have to report to her. After a stint like his, there’s a slew of group meetings, sharing, and comforting one another with a special, potent vibe of an organization much like Alcoholics Anonymous, minus the coffee bar in the back. It’s better than a psychoanalysis, though. At least with these, he normally has to just show up and do his time. Most people, other empaths included, give him a wide berth and leave him well enough alone, the way he wants.

            Will glances to Director Hansen’s shoes, jaw working furiously. “…I empathize with his struggles,” he says dryly.

            Everyone in the group laughs, except for the director.

            “This is an exercise meant to make you more comfortable with returning to work. It’s a support system so that you know you’re not alone,” Director Hansen says. She’s not impressed with his joke, and he can feel her displeasure on his skin like muggy Florida humidity. “It’s also a requirement that you participate so that I can sign off and support you back into the field.”

            “I’m not feeling well,” he decides, and he stands up, walking out of the room. He’ll get a sign off from someone else later, from someone that isn’t a director of empath agents, someone that’s not in charge of babysitting the lot of them so that some higher-paid neurotypical can keep them all in line and feel good about themselves.

            He pauses by the small vending machine, kicks it idly and feeds it a crumpled dollar. He snatches up the bag of trail mix from the bottom, as well as a candy bar long forgotten by someone else, and he paces along a wall displaying the photos of empaths fallen in the line of duty.

            Half of them fell due to a potent blend of self-destructive habits and suicide, but they don’t share that part in the FBI tours. He recognizes some of them as the Rogue Agents he aided the FBI in tracking down.

            “Lost in your thoughts?” someone asks. Will refuses to look over at them, taking a huge, unsightly bite of the candy bar, a little disappointed that someone abandoned a 100 Grand rather than a 3 Musketeers. Maybe that’s why it was abandoned. No one really _enjoyed_ a 100 Grand candy bar, they simply made due because that’s all that was there.

            “Yes.”

            “I imagine that happens often, given the way a Dreamer thinks.”

            Will doesn’t bother to correct him –he’s not a Dreamer, he’s an E-3, something far worse, far less stable than a Dreamer.

            “Thoughts lending to a less tasty side of the world, no matter where you point your gaze.”

            “I build forts,” he says. The person draws close but leaves a respectable distance, the way everyone does. There are no laws saying you can’t impose on an empath’s personal space, but there’s an unwritten, tacit rule that you just don’t get too close unless you want them knowing your deepest, darkest secrets like it was common knowledge.

            “Nightmares rise quickly in your line of work, I’d imagine.”

            “So do forts.”

            “Forts are not so effective when you incidentally lock the monsters inside, though,” the man says, and Will lets out an unattractive, ugly snort before looking over at him, gaze pinned to his pocket square in a loud shade of yellow. He doesn’t dare look at his face. He doesn’t want to see.

            “Are you trying to psychoanalyze me?” he demands, glaring at the offensive color. “Did Director Hansen send you after me? Agent Crawford?”

            “Do you feel psychoanalyzed?” the man asks. Out of Will’s peripheral, he sees neatly combed hair in enough shades of blonde to be confusing, a strong jaw and cheekbones sharp enough to cut. His expression is placid, calm in the face of Will’s annoyance.

            He takes another bite of the 100 Grand, talks around it in his mouth. “You can ask anyone else here, no one likes to see me psychoanalyzed.”

            “You’re speaking as though I should know who you are,” the man says. “I’m merely making conversation.”

            “Bull shit,” Will retorts. “Lies are about as easy to see as acne. You know who I am.”

            “Can you see my lies?” the man wonders. His clipped, smooth accent dips and lowers as his cadence slows. “If you looked at me now, would you see my lies as a Seer would?”

            “Yes.”

            “Show me.”

            The taunt is just needling enough that Will glances to his eyes, an easy enough feat when they’re the same height. Eyes reveal all, and Will Graham has seen enough eyes to learn to hate them, resent them for the secrets they hold that he’s never wanted to know. The place the iris meets to the pupil is the ugliest of all because he always feels like he’s falling into them, going to a place where the labyrinth of the mind falls away, leaving him with hands black with tar and a stomach churning from the dark. He always sees a person’s darkness first before he can see the good, and it’s always bad enough, always bleak enough that no matter how much good offsets the evil, he can’t find his way out. He’s trapped, and he can only see the monsters.

            How surprising for him, then, when looking into eyes the color of aged blood, he sees nothing at all.

            He thinks to look away, eyes watering, but he can’t bring himself to. He’s stunned at the absolute _nothing_ that he sees, the emptiness of a void like there is no person beneath. The man stares back at him, meeting his unsteady, wavering stance with an assurance of someone that knows the thoughts racing through his mind, having probably heard it for a long, long time from many others.

            _I can’t see him_ , Will thinks to himself, dazedly. _I can’t hear him. It’s like there’s nothing there at all._

“…What are you?” Will says out loud. If the man is offended by the question, he doesn’t show it. He isn’t breaking Will’s dumbfounded, open stare either, staring right back with equal frankness.

            “I am Dr. Hannibal Lecter,” he says lightly, extending his hand. “I’d like to have a conversation with you, if at all possible. I think I may be of some help.”

            And Will, unable to help himself, spellbound by a face that doesn’t crowd his mind and make the demons crawl inside, reaches out and shakes his hand. He coughs to dispel a pressure building in his chest, something threatening to burst, and he nods dumbly.

            “…Alright. Let’s talk.”


	2. With Blurry Eyes We See

Chapter 2:

            They find a space outside where the air is cold but Will can have something to set his gaze on that’s not the eggshell white walls of the FBI. He’s passed a coffee from the visitor’s center, and he grips the cardboard cup tightly, almost threatening to pop the top off with his strangle-like hold. Occasionally, he sneaks glances to the man beside him in an odd blue suit with a yellow tie matching his pocket square, but he is just as silent, mind just as unbending. Will sees it much like a great stone wall, something he can press his palm to but ultimately see nothing behind.

            _Is this what it’s like for everyone else?_ He wonders. _Is this how wonderful it is to be someone nothing like me?_

“Dr. Bloom and I have worked together many times, so when she called me asking for a favor, I was obliged to help,” Dr. Lecter says, crossing one leg over another. He rests an expensive, wool coat over his lap, not quite cold enough to need to put it on. Will studies the smooth fibers of it and bobs his head, peeking down to their shoes. Beside Will’s faded, questionable dress shoes the product of far too many years uncared for, his are immaculate, nary a crease in the lining of them.

            “She is the prying type,” he replies, not unkind. Alana Bloom is the result of a friendship bred of her fascination with his mind but her refusal to disrespect him by prying. She works frequently with the EBAU, more often than not in order to keep an eye on him by request of Director Hansen, the DEA.

            “She informed me that you were an E-3, a rare demographic of empaths,” he says. “I’d heard of their existence but it was more of a rumor within the psychiatric field than anything else.”

            “There are five known E-3’s in the world, and four of them are in psychiatric hospitals,” Will replies. The words are bitter, and they leave a feeling on his tongue like he’s bit into the skin of an apple that hadn’t been washed of its waxy residue. He tongues the roof of his mouth, frowning.

            “You’re not.”

            “I’m not,” Will agrees. “That’s because I was discovered before I could have a complete psychotic break and go into a comatose state.”

            “The institute that they train and educate empaths at is here in DC, isn’t it?” Dr. Lecter asks.

            “There’s one here, one in Nevada, and one in Washington.”

            Dr. Lecter nods and stares out at the courtyard where trees shed their leaves, stains of red among russet ocher and golden delicious yellow. Will watches the breeze pull more leaves from a branch, tracks its spiraling movement before it settles to the ground to rest. He blows air out of the side of his mouth.

            “Why can’t I see you?” he asks when Lecter doesn’t pry for anything more. He chances another glance to his eyes –nothing. There’s absolutely nothing.

            “They did several scans on my brain quite a long time ago to try and ascertain why there seems to be a block within my mind that prevents empaths from seeing anything. There is a foreign wave that throughout much of my years in university they studied, but it’s ultimately come to nothing. A unique outlier, someone that Seers cannot see and Dreamers cannot broach the psyche of to grow thoughts within their own mind.”

            “What about Feelers?”

            “Feelers, with direct skin contact, can certainly gain impressions.” Lecter glances to the gloves on Will’s hands, snug against his skin, a thin and supple leather for every day wear. “Although after your last encounter with physical touch, I wouldn’t recommend it.”

            “I don’t have physical contact with anyone if I can help it,” Will replies. “…It was an accident.”

            “A burst of adrenaline in the heat of the moment, your desire to save a life far more paramount than your own survival. The fact that you only went into shock rather than die is a credit to the strength of your mind,” Dr. Lecter compliments kindly. “Given that you are an E-3, I am doubly impressed that such contact, skin to skin, eye to eye, mind to mind, was met with your blunt refusal to do nothing more than live.”

            “What does Dr. Bloom hope you can do for me?” Will asks. He chances another look, stares at Lecter in profile, the surprise just as powerful now as it was before, when he’d first looked.

            “Ensure that you don’t internalize your experience to the point that at any given point in time, you either lash out at yourself or someone else.”

            “They think I’m a suicide risk?” His lip curls at the thought, derisive.

            “Aren’t you?”

            By general consensus, all empaths are a suicide risk due to the statistics of depression and suicide rampant within those cursed with the ‘gift’, but Will doesn’t want to say that. He doesn’t like thinking about it, let alone talking about it.

            “Therapy doesn’t work on me, Dr. Lecter,” he says instead, redirecting. He watches another leaf fall into the already large pile at the base of the trunk. Someone will have to rake them up soon.

            “Why?”

            “I know the tests, I know the tricks. My work at the FBI required a thorough study of psychology, apart from my training with my empathy. It’d be a waste of time for you and me, and if there’s one thing people tend to care about, it’s wasted time.” Among other things, like a wasted life, a wasted breath. A wasted death.

            “Then I certainly don’t suggest therapy,” Lecter says gravely. His agreement with Will is surprising; most people urge him to set aside his concerns, get over himself and get the help that he truly needs. He can’t explain to them how he can’t quiet his mind enough to do the exercises, that the tricks and tests are obvious enough to him that he knows the words to avoid, the things to say to get what he wants rather than the things he needs.

            “Thank you,” Will says, relieved. That’s twice in one day he’s surprised by this man. There’s something almost exhilarating in the fact.

            “Instead, I would suggest that we have conversations.”

            “Conversations.” And there it goes. Flat. Blunt. Unimpressed.

            “To my understanding, half of the struggles of an empath is the sense that they are trapped within their own mind, victim to the sensations that their brain waves cause due to the attunement they have to mankind around them. Sometimes, all one needs is another person to share such thoughts with, so that they don’t fester inside.”

            He sounds utterly serious in his explanation, like what he’s suggesting should come easy to someone like Will Graham. He wants to laugh, but he doesn’t. Instead, he sighs, tilting his head back to look up at the sky.

            “Jack Crawford tells me that you have a particular knack for the monsters,” Lecter continues when Will doesn’t reply. “Not all empaths do, but you do.”

            “It’s an active imagination coupled with my abilities.”

            “And that active imagination, coupled with your abilities, allowed you to save the life of someone who is now in a stable condition. If you hadn’t helped Abigail Hobbs by killing Agent Hobbs, she’d be in far worse shape –dead.”

            Will doesn’t see it that way. His hands flex, shake, and he recalls the sensation of his neck tearing, parting with ease like one would filet a fish –a smooth, swift slashing motion before the blood begins to pour, greedy with every heartbeat.

            Maybe if he could just _see_ her alive, it’d be enough to quiet the screaming inside?

            “I don’t think conversations are what I want, either,” he says at last, standing up. A breeze turns, tugs at his jacket. “I gotta hand it to you, you threw me off at first. That doesn’t happen very much. I’m good at knowing people.” He peeks at his face once more, nodding to himself at the silence. Odd, he thinks, but it’s an outlier, and he will find enough ways to research the phenomenon he’s never come across before without having to talk to someone to do it.

            “I’d apologize for it, but I’m not entirely sorry,” Lecter says, standing as well.

            “At least you’re honest.”

            “I try to use terminology such as that sparingly, to not sully it with overuse.”

            “That’s fair,” Will replies, and he thinks to maybe shake his hand since most people shake hands in situations like this. He can’t, though. Even gloved, a small, whispering fear lurks that it will not be enough protection, and he’ll be back in a cabin in the woods with a neck wound that’s bleeding out. Jack would have a field day, and Director Hansen would find a way to set him off to the side on the bench for the rest of his career.

            He firmly decides not to shake his hand.

            “I would ask that you at least consider my offer; even a simple conversation can make a difference between standing on stable ground and feeling like one is too close to the edge,” Hannibal says. He doesn’t try to extend his hand.

            “No thank you.” Will heads towards the door, and he pauses when he doesn’t hear Lecter follow. “…Now that I know what I wanted to know about you, I don’t find you that interesting.”

            The door is closing behind him when he hears Hannibal say, twenty shades of amused, “You will.”

-

            It was a lie, of course. Will Graham finds Hannibal Lecter very, _very_ interesting.

            He’s on the internet, not socially, but through published works discussing the phenomenon of his mind completely rejecting Seers and Dreamers. It was only through a Feeler putting a hand on him that he said he gained the impression of immense sadness and grief, and Lecter had admitted in the study of thinking of his long dead sister at the time. The Feeler hadn’t been able to see Lecter’s sister, vivid in his mind, but he’d merely gained the impression of sadness. Grief speaking of years of loss, something aged.

            There was an odd brain pattern that they detected through numerous scans, but after compiling the data, he ultimately left the study so that he could return to his own education. A man of medicine who worked as a surgeon before ultimately switching to psychiatry and establishing a practice.

            It’s during short breaks that he reads several published pieces in journals, Beverly’s tablet in one hand, a mildly shriveled clementine in the other. There have been studies specifically from where he grew up, Lithuania, studies in males with certain eye colors, certain builds, certain behaviors. So far, in the psychological world, Hannibal Lecter is the only one like this.

            Much like Will Graham, Hannibal Lecter is unique, too.

            He’s distracted from his hunger for information and from his clementine by work, though. Jack Crawford spoke with Director Hansen, and it seemed that he didn’t need a sign off from her after all. He can go back to hunting Rogue Agents, agents of the FBI whose empathy grew so burdensome that they snapped.

            The man he sits across from is older, greying and bespectacled, hair that was once blonde giving way to age. He is twitchy, and Will notes hands that clench, grip, and clasp before he focuses on the edge of his glasses so that he doesn’t have to see. He’s not a RA brought before Will, but a simple warm-up, a test from Jack to see just how he does after a mere week of rest after Hobbs.

            “Mr. Stammets, do you know why you’re here?” he asks.

            “Yes.” Although his body betrays his unease, his mild disconnect, his voice is steady and sure. A pharmacist, one used to dealing with confused and unsure patients.

            “You’re wanted in conjunction with the disappearance of several men and women that were found buried in shallow graves with sugar water being fed via intravenous fluids. You claim no such knowledge, although an unconscious woman was found in the trunk of your car.”

            “I didn’t do it, I didn’t,” he presses, and Will nods. It’s that declaration of innocence that caused him to be brought into the room.

            “Do you know who I am, Mr. Stammets?”

            “I don’t.”

            “I’m Agent Will Graham of the EBAU.” It’s his name that coins recognition; having studied medicine in school, Eldon Stammets would know everything there was to know about empaths. He stares at Will, and a slow, sorrowful resignation takes over. Seconds tick slow on the watch face on Will’s wrist.

            “…It’s over then, isn’t it?” he finally asks, and his hands that once twitched jerk about as he begins to drum them on the table to dispel anxious energy. “They had a legal sign-off allowing you to come in here, so you’re going to know everything.”

            “I’m going to know everything,” Will agrees, and _God_ sometimes he wishes he didn’t.

            He doesn’t have to remove his gloves to touch; looking into Stammets’ eyes give him everything, and he removes his glasses so that there are no barriers, nothing to keep them apart. When he looks up to Stammets’ suddenly terrified face, he meets his eyes and falls in, tumbling over and over and over until he lands on his hands and knees beside mounds of dirt, the soil beneath him rich and decadent with fertilizer and life that grows with wild abandon.

            _It is a need, and it grasps, reaches. We are not all this, beings of flesh and bone, but something spanning a greater time, a time  when all there was was the sensations of living, of being alive. We reached, and in reaching we were touched, connected, and god that’s all I’ve ever wanted, was to connect._

He pulls himself from the stream of thought, from the need that makes his throat dry and his hands shake. He’s never been able to connect, never been able to reach and be reached in return, and he stands from his crouched position, brushing dirt from his pants.

            Beside him, there is a shovel. He picks it up and turns, studying the comatose man whose hands are laid at his sides, at peace with what is happening to him –at least, that is what he tells himself.

            Mechanically, Will Graham turns and begins to toss dirt on him, starting from feet and working his way up. There is a detached, clinical side of him that grazes over the image, pausing at the tube inserted into his mouth so that he can breathe, then the tubes that are inserted with precision and practice at his arm. Alongside this grave, there are eight others much like it, and that is when the feelings of excitement, _pride_ emerge. They know he is here.

            _They know he is here_.

            Will Graham pulls himself from the image, and in his mind it is a lurching sensation where he has to physically rip himself from the shreds of the memory, slamming a barrier in place before he can fall back in. In reality, his wide, unblinking eyes suddenly blink once, then rapidly to wet them. His hands clench, unclench in his lap, and he stares at Stammets’ nose so that he doesn’t crawl back into his gaze. His breath is curt, short.

            “They know you are there,” he tells Stammets, connected to one part of a whole.

            “They know you are there,” Stammets agrees, and at the sense of connection to Graham, he bows his head in relief.

-

            He sits across from Jack at his desk, file in hand.

            “You haven’t gone to see Dr. Lecter?”

            “We met.” Will props his chin up with a gloved hand, turning a paper aside to stare at a photo. He keeps going back to Stammets, then back to Hobbs. He blinks, and Hobbs doesn’t just fall with one shot –why did he have to shoot so many god damn times?

            “And?” Jack prompts when Will doesn’t continue.

            “I think I can deal with it in my own way,” he says, turning another photo over. The fungi reach, and he wants to reach back. “I don’t need a therapist to do it.”

            “Director Hansen informed me that sending you back without making you open up will only subject you to a further troubled psyche. She said you can’t properly hunt RA’s after the last one ending like it did.”

            “I need the repetition of work,” he replies. He wants it to sound firm, but it comes out more like a request. “My work is what’s normal to me, so for her to try and take it away will do more damage than good, I think.”

            Jack wants to argue that, but in reality his work is made all the easier because of Graham, so he decides not to fight it. Will can sense the see-saw of emotion before resolution sets in.

            “Did you know that mycelium can actually sense when you come near?” Will asks. He glances up from the file to focus on the paper weight on Jack’s desk. “Their spores reach out to you. You think you enter a glade without wildlife and you’re alone, but they know you are there.”

            “His confession means a faster court trial, and with your testimony on it, he’ll go away for a long, long time,” Jack says. That’s why they have empaths in crime units.

            “Hobbs thought of his victims as his daughters, but he was a hunter. In his own way, to stomach gutting them and grinding their bones, he probably also saw them as deer, as any other animal.” He goes to bite a nail, lips pausing at the glove firmly on his hands. It’s a rule that during work hours, those don’t come off until it’s time for application of his talents. Stammets wished so dearly to connect that he didn’t even have to use his hands. “Deer step soft in the underbrush so they don’t break the blades of grass and disturb anything. They know the mycelium is there, and it knows they’re there. In a way, Hobbs thought of the girls as his daughter, and as deer. In a way, Hobbs targeted people that were so attuned and connected that they could walk into the forest and know you were there, and in knowing, knew the mycelium knew as well.”

            “The girls were deer?” Jack asks, confused.

            “The girls were his daughter, but in a way they were deer,” Will says impatiently. “And deer don’t want to harm the ecosystem. They have more cares to connections than we do. That’s why Stammets buried us. So we could all connect.”

            “…Take a walk,” Jack suggests.

            Will takes a walk.

            He finds himself at the hospital where Abigail Hobbs rests, and he sits down on the bench outside of her room since they still won’t let him in. It’s logical, he reasons, that they won’t let him in. Although he is a FBI agent, she isn’t awake for questioning, and there’s no reason he’d need to trounce about her room with a file open containing photos of her father’s case.

            The Minnesota Shrike, caught at last.

            Will stares down at his display, ten shots along his stomach, chest, and shoulders. They’re a pretty centered spread, considering his panic and his fear –he knows part of that panic and fear was Abigail’s seeping into the air, but it does nothing to lessen the severity of it. Seeing the image makes him think of how quick he’d been to kill rather than subdue. Most empaths aren’t allowed to carry firearms, but after a series of tests and evaluations, he was deemed worthy of it.

            Seeing how many shots it took to drop Hobbs, he was going to have to change to a far more powerful gun.

            It’s not the first Rogue Agent he’s tracked, but it’s by far the worst. Will Graham’s specialty in the FBI isn’t so much his empathy as it is his ability to use his empathy to keep other agents in line. Empaths working in any form of the government are trained under the FBI’s fierce regiment to control their gifts and are considered ‘agents’ of some way, shape, or form –in the almost inevitable turn of their mind, when barriers fall and the empath experiences a psychotic break, it’s Will Graham that steps in and tracks them before they can hurt anyone.

            Agent Garrett Jacob Hobbs waded his way through eight girls and one wife before Will managed to find him.

            “Agent Graham, she’s ready for you.”

            He looks up at the nurse holding a small clipboard, confused. Her stance isn’t wavering, her mark clear. She knew exactly who to speak to, what to say. Rather than question it, he nods, clears his throat and stands up, glancing about the hallway, seeing no one to tip him off to what’s happened.

            “Thank you,” he says slowly. He follows her no-nonsense walk into Abigail Hobbs’ room like this was his plan all along, like he hadn’t planned to lurk outside of her room until it was verging on weird and distinctly not okay.

            Hannibal Lecter is waiting inside, and that’s all he needs to know.

            “Agent Graham,” he says, and he thankfully doesn’t extend his hand.

            Once the nurse steps out, he takes note of the room, making a quick left face and heading to Abigail who lays fast asleep. He takes her in with the same quick, sweeping glances that he had in the hall, and he adjusts a blanket rumpled from someone setting something on it. It looks like the indent of a book.

            “How did you know?” he asks once he can gain control of his voice. Every steady, assuring beep of the heart monitor bolsters him, gives him courage that his actions weren’t in vain.

            “Agent Crawford called, and I supposed that you would want to come here, to try and gain some semblance of yourself. Having felt her in death, you will not feel whole until she wakes, yes?”

            “…Yes.”

            He wants to look at Lecter, see his silence once more, but he can’t because he is wholly fixated on Abigail Hobbs and the way her lungs expand and lift skin, utterly promising with the assurance that she can indeed breathe.

            When he can finally tear his gaze away, he pulls up a chair and sits down, gripping the case files tightly. Hannibal mimics him, drawing up a chair near the foot of the bed.

            “…I looked you up,” he admits. Look up is an understatement, but he’s not going to go into any more details than that. He still has the journals pulled up on Beverly’s tablet to read whenever he gets the chance.

            “Did you?”

            “I wanted to see if what you were saying was true.”

            “What did you find?” Hannibal wonders.

            “You don’t connect in the sense of modern day people. No apps, no social media sites; you do have a website, but you encourage them to call or e-mail rather than glean your therapy style off of what someone posts online about you.”

            “I said no such thing,” Hannibal objects kindly.

            “You didn’t have to,” Will replies. “I’m good at picking up on tone, and while you’ll use the internet as a tool, you prefer in-person connections.”

            “Yes,” Hannibal agrees. “Anyone can project what they like onto the internet. I find that face-to-face conversations yield the best results in learning about a person.”

            “You’re also not afraid to manipulate if you think it will get you something that you want,” Will said, staring at Abigail. Although her eyes are closed, he can see the sallowness of her skin, can see walls rising up around him to become her house, a world in which she loves her father and fears him, hunts alongside him and wonders when she will become the hunted. He’d tried to connect to her the only way he knew how. Hobbs tried to protect her the only way he knew how.

            “I think that in our own way, we all have a special talent for manipulation when we think it’s something important,” Hannibal replied guiltlessly. “My gaining you access here was so that we could speak, yes, but I also thought to help you ease some of your burdens in worrying over her state. You hadn’t seen her living, therefore you could only focus on her potential demise.”

            The fact that he knows that after only one conversation with Will is staggering, and he thinks back on Lecter’s personal works he’d chewed through with eager interest. He was prominent in the psychiatry circles, not necessarily due to a frequent use of the journals to promote his work, but that he only published sparingly. What he did share, though, was so utterly poignant and dense with information that even Will could see the mild genius behind it.

            “You honestly think that a simple conversation with you is going to be the thing that I need?” Will asks. He glances over to Lecter, stares at his face, and marvels at the absolute silence.

            “Better me than Jack Crawford. You honestly made him nervous with your speech about deer and mycelium,” Hannibal replies. He sounds mildly amused at the thought.

            “…I think that when I speak, I make him nervous about a lot of things,” Will says slowly. His words have somewhat of a ‘confessional’ vibe to them that he’s not entirely fond of.

            “Do you experience that with most people you know?”

            “Do you?”

            “No,” Lecter replies. “But that in no way lessens my ability to have conversations with you.”

            Will chews on the side of his mouth, staring at Abigail’s hands. He wonders what impressions he’d get of her now, if he dared touch skin to skin. He’s touched those in unconsciousness before, gotten a feel for their dreams, their last emotions while conscious. He decides not to risk it with her, in case the only thing he can feel is her dying. Although trained to build barriers between him and those he comes into contact with, Will is well aware that that sort of ability does not exist with Abigail Hobbs –not after the first time he grabbed her neck and thought he was dying.

            “If she wakes up,” Will murmurs, agonized, “she’s going to see me as the man that killed her father.”

            “Perhaps. Or perhaps she will see you as the man that saved her life.”

            Will nods, accepts this as an option although it is a bleak, reaching one at best. He blows air out of his mouth harshly, rubs gloved palms together. “I’ll talk to you, Dr. Lecter, but I can’t ensure you’re going to entirely like it.”

            “Rest assured, Agent Graham, I’m going to take an inordinate amount of pleasure in getting to know you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for your patience for an update! Where I've got 3 other fics going at this time, to prevent delayed posts I'll do this guy every other week until those are wrapped up, then I'll do a once-a-week update. I'm thinking Monday would work best!
> 
> I just got back from a long weekend family reunion visit, and without service/wifi I was unable to update anything in a timely manner. Hope you understand! :)


	3. With Little Thought We Dream

Chapter 3:

            Even serial killers got funerals.

            Will Graham stands beside an unknown woman and a small, anonymous funeral director. Garrett Jacob Hobbs had been gleaned of any and all they could take from him, from DNA to fingerprints to hair follicles. With no court case, no ruling to take place, they wanted a swift and clean burial for him, and only one family member –a distant one at that –had arrived to see him put six feet under.

            She doesn’t cry, and she doesn’t speak to Will. For that he is immensely relieved.

            He hates graveyards. There is no quiet in them, no rest in them. There was no service for Garrett Jacob Hobbs, and with Abigail Hobbs still not awake in the hospital, the funeral director didn’t think to offer.

            “It’s at this time that people normally pay their last respects,” the director says, poised over the coffin.

            “You’ll make sure he goes down?” the woman asks. “Six feet under and covered in dirt?”

            Will isn’t sure if she’s addressing him or if she’s addressing the director; he nods all the same.

            She leaves them then, heels sinking into the soft earth where thousands rot, and Will watches the coffin sink slowly, going down, down, down until it hits the bottom with a soft _thump_.

            “Is there anything you wish to say?” the director asks.

            Will shakes his head. He isn’t confidant that if he speaks, he’ll sound coherent or make any sense.

            He sits down and watches the gravediggers work –he isn’t sure what he’s waiting for until they press the sod down and leave him with a modest, plain gravestone proclaiming nothing more than his name, the year he was born, and the year he died. No mention of being a loving father. No mention of being a kind husband. It’s nice to see that stark honesty, considering he was neither of those things.

            The graves aren’t quiet. Will has been to enough cemeteries to be able to feel the sensations of trapped souls beneath the soil, the grief that sits along every blade of grass, the triumph of the killer standing in the crowd and gloating. He once recalled an empath in ‘group’ that had attended a funeral, only to feel the life of someone trapped in a coffin not twenty feet away, freshly buried. They managed to save the man, although he was in a coma for some time after. The empath drunk himself into a car crash, and he later said he just had to get the taste of dirt out of his mouth.

            He sits for a while longer, stares at the gravestone and the space where Garrett Jacob Hobbs will forever remain. There is a sense of righteous pride that Will was able to stop him and save Abigail, but there is also the horror as the look on Hobbs’ face was burned into Will’s eye: pain, indignation, and a love that seared and left marks.

            It isn’t until he hears voices that he stands up to leave, and he purposefully skirts around the grave so that he can’t feel Hobbs beneath him. He wonders if he takes off his shoes and presses his bare feet to the sod if he’ll still feel him breathing.

-

            Lecter ambushes him for lunch, a thermos in one hand and two travel containers in another. Will thinks to turn him away, standing poised by the entrance to HQ as he is, but at the sight of Director Hansen a short distance away, he accepts the invitation. He’d rather be ambushed by Lecter than Director Hansen.

            “Do you often miss meals, Agent Graham?” he asks, sitting down at a bench.

            “Why do you ask?”

            “It’s three P.M., and people have normally eaten by now.”

            Will watches him unsnap the small bowls, revealing a salad inside with strips of meat laid across the top. The dressing is on the side, and he fumbles with the lid while Hannibal passes over silverware.

            “You haven’t eaten,” he points out.

            “I was traveling for work and was unfortunately detained. What’s your reason?”

            “I had a funeral to go to,” he mumbles. If he says it with enough regret and remorse, he figures Hannibal won’t press on details.

            “The funeral of Garrett Jacob Hobbs?”

            Nevermind, then. He drizzles the sauce over the salad, taking the fork and spearing a few bits of lettuce before he stuffs his mouth and chews, nodding his appreciation at the taste.

            “This is delicious, thank you,” he manages after he’s swallowed. Hannibal’s gaze is steady on him, and he turns a piece of meat over with his fork, itchy under the stare. “Yes, his.”

            “Did you find what you were looking for?” he asks.

            “No.”

            “What did you find as you stood inside of the space where he will forever have a passive presence?”

            Will takes a bite of the meat and chews, the flavor of a careful blend of herbs and spices rich and practiced, the mark of someone that cooks and cooks remarkably well. There is something else, though, something that reeks of fear, of racing hearts and a terror that bites deep that makes his jaw freeze, his muscles clench involuntarily. His teeth scratch along one another, and he has to force himself to swallow, the food a rock that drags down his throat slowly.

            “…Nothing,” he manages. His stomach roils, and he stuffs another mouthful of lettuce into his mouth to try and wash away the taste of the animal that had died. He has a sudden urge to vomit.

            “Something wrong?” Hannibal asks.

            “…I can’t always eat meat,” he admits. He wants to feel apologetic about it, but he can’t bring himself to. His tone is challenging, daring Hannibal to question it.

            “What do you feel?”

            “…Terror. Sometimes the meat tastes like terror.” He snorts and rubs his mouth, like he can somehow wipe away the sensation of being cornered, of the final frantic moments of life. “What animal was it?”

            “A rabbit.”

            “He should have hopped faster,” Will mutters. He spears another piece of lettuce and stuffs it into his mouth.

            “Yes, he should have,” Hannibal agrees with a smile. “Is it like that with all meat for you?”

            “Sometimes. Some animals die peacefully, or the food is processed or long dead enough that by the time it gets to me, everything that made it an animal is gone.”

            “I do have a personal butcher who sells what he hunts for. I know his beef, pork, and geese are handled humanely, but I can’t account for how the hunted behave before they die.”

            Will looks up at him and manages a small, sardonic smile. “Their hearts race, their eyes widen, and in that final moment their muscles tighten. That was a very terrified rabbit.”

            They finish their meals in silence, the only thing left in Will’s bowl the neatly cut and cooked remains of a rabbit that just wasn’t fast enough.

            The drink in the thermos is a coffee with a rich enough taste that it washes away the remains of Will’s nausea. He sips it, mouth passing along the lip of the cup, and he chances a peek to Hannibal once more. Still silent. Still inscrutable. Curiosity burns inside of him at the sight, as well as something akin to awe. He holds it back, though. He doesn’t want to seem too interested, too intent on the silence.

            “I suppose I was looking for some kind of closure,” he admits, referring to Hobbs.

            “Is he the first man you’ve ever killed?”

            “Yes.”

            “Is it his death that haunts your dreams, or the fact that you were the one to do it?”

            Will wants to lie, but he figures that defeats the purpose of even doing this in the first place. “I didn’t hesitate. The moment one didn’t drop him, there was another. Then another, and another, until there were no bullets left.”

            “You walked into a room where your senses were alive to the situation due to your intimate knowledge of your killer, coupled with your adrenaline as well as your skills as an E-3. Naturally, there would be no hesitation on your part because by then, instincts would take over.”

            “Some people have a flight instinct, or at least a freeze instinct,” Will points out.

            “You have a fight instinct, but all that means is you are far more adept at survival than your counterparts. Does that somehow make you less of a person, or less deserving of life because you are better at preserving it?”

            _Yes_ , Will thinks, although he manages to say, “That is what I’m struggling with.”

            “Then going to Garrett Jacob Hobbs’ funeral sounds more like a punishment than a need for closure.”

            “Killers like that don’t have large, public funerals. Empaths that have a psychotic break and lash out don’t receive large, public funerals, either.”

            “Do you compare the two often?”

            “It comes with the job. The last serial killer we found before Hobbs was an E-2, a Feeler and a Dreamer.” He pauses, wondering if he should share anything more. Reluctantly, he says, “Hobbs was an agent close to retirement. An empath –a dreamer.”

            “Bare hands on the surfaces of anything that opened stories and fantasies within his head that he couldn’t differentiate from reality,” Hannibal murmurs. He has a poetic, flowered form of speech that is somehow lovely rather than corny. “Do you think you will be like that one day?”

            “I wear gloves,” he said. “As long as I keep them on, I don’t have to worry about things like that.”

            He doesn’t have to worry about things like that, but he does anyway. When he returns to work and is handed a file containing the information regarding a rogue E-2 FBI Agent, he worries even more.

-

            The plane dumps them into a small town in Georgia, the most exciting part of the town being their annual BBQ & Blues festival that the FBI had just missed out on. Will tracks the signs struck into the ground every so many feet advertising an amazing homemade BBQ sauce competition with a rain-stained cardboard paper sign taped to the side declaring the winner Suzanne Perkins.

            Suzanne Perkins would never claim her fifty dollar gift certificate to her choice of restaurant, though; she wouldn’t do anything ever again.

            Once again he finds himself waiting while Jack Crawford goes through the house, clearing everything out and ensuring that it’s safe. He scuffs his shoe along the gravel, traces idle figure eights with his toe. Despite it having been a day since the incident, people still mill about the police line, necks craning to catch a glimpse of anything they can see.

            “Agent Francis Dolarhyde, E-2 Seer and Dreamer,” Beverly says, waiting beside him. “I worked with him once –two years ago? Quiet guy. Cleft pallet and really pretty eyes.”

            Will studies his dossier, his photo sharp and clean despite the barely noticeable cleft pallet. His suit is pressed, and following the first photo there is a second showing him in Marine Corps dress blues, expression equally somber and striking.

            “It’s confirmed him?” he asks.

            “He was supposed to report in after gaining information from his last assignment out in the field, but he never did. His handler reported it, and they started tracking his last movements. Cameras got him at the Atlanta Airport, witness saw him refuse to pay for gas at a gas station on the way here. Cameras confirmed it was him chinsing out on paying.”

            “He’s never even had a speeding ticket,” Will murmurs. An E-2 is not as rare as an E-3, although they tend to be more volatile. Will can’t recall the number of studies done trying to figure out why _that’s_ a thing, but from personal experience he can say it’s because an E-3 is more likely to become a vegetable before they even get the chance to try and lash out at someone, let alone have a psychotic break and commit murder.

            “Clean record, although he was essentially abandoned by his mother before we got a hold of him and sent him to the institution. Maybe something happened there and it’s finally manifesting now.”

            “Always blame the mom,” Will says sagely. Sarcastically.

            He’s allowed in by Crawford, and Beverly trails after him in order to speak with Jack in low, hushed tones. When he steps into the house, there is a shift in the air around him, like the very space he stands in is drenched in screams. It takes him a beat too long to walk past the entry, delve farther into a house that for all intents and purposes, looks completely normal.

            That is, until he gets to the hall where the family sleeps.

            The blood spread along the wall burns into his eyes, and as he stares he can see the walls within his mind folding up and falling away, leaving him in a strange sense of limbo, his skin not his own, his bones not his own. Numbly, he takes off his gloves and tucks them away, relieved to know that at least this time, there would be no living person to distract him with their almost-death.

            He places his bare hand on the walls and falls inside of the memory.

            _I wake to a suppressed gunshot; my half-sleeping mind is delirious, confused, until my wife screams and I’m very much awake, shouting out. Another shot, quiet, muffled, and a burning pain erupts in my neck, makes my cry cut short. Blankets, tight around me strangle, and I fumble and fall from the bed, wheezing. The blood is hot against my cheek, and distantly my wife cries and cries and cries._

_Shadowed foosteps retreat from the room. My children. My children._

_It is not strength that carries me, stumbling and bleeding out down the hall, but a terror as I realize that I am dying and my children are going to die, too. I try to speak, try to moan my disapproval at that, but the words are impossible, the searing pain in my neck arresting. As he goes to open the door, I throw myself at him, and we grapple, falling into the wall where his arms flail and the gun is seen, distinctly grey in the hallway night light._

_I am dying. I am dying._

_He turns the gun, and I bite into his neck, knowing that as I do I will die, that I will die and he will take my children. The barrel presses to my temple, upside down, and I rip into his skin, draw blood._

_There is a searing pain against my skin. Then nothing, nothing._

Will comes to with a hiss, stumbling back and catching himself. As quickly as the walls went down he tries to draw them up, and he focuses on compartmentalizing and drawing in deep breaths before he continues. Behind him, he senses the footfalls of a scene annotator, and he turns his head.

            “The wife was shot first, then the husband. Their bedroom. He tried to follow the RA down the hall when the RA went for the children, and he got a bite out of him.”

            “Test tissue residue in Mr. Perkins’ mouth,” the annotator murmurs, nodding.

            Will steps into the room across from the smearing of blood, the splatter on the wall he knows to be Mr. Perkin’s brain matter, and he stares at the carnage. There is blood soaking in one of the pillows on the bed to the left, then a large puddle of it underneath the bed on the right.

            “The first child is shot in bed, the second dragged out from under their bed before being shot,” he murmurs, kneeling down. He stares at the spaces on the frame of the bed where hands dared press, and he reaches out and presses his palms to them.

            _Precision, cold and trained, something of instinct and repetition alike –the child hides but I do not fear, I do not worry that I cannot reach them. They scream, struggle, but there is no resistance, like a blade of grass falling to a finely honed knife. They were not taught to hide as I was, not taught to know how to be quiet enough to avoid notice. I was, though. I hide and I hide inside of my own mind, unaware of myself._

_You’re screaming, but don’t you understand that you are not just flesh? You are light and air and color and quick sounds ended because I decided to change you. Balloons of color bursting, conjoining with those that fell before to create anew. You scrabble away from me, pleading, but there is no escape. There is no escape._

_This is my design. I will Become._

Will jerks from the sensations of Dolarhyde’s thoughts with far less finesse than he did with Mr. Perkins’. It takes far longer to raise the barriers between him and the feeling of cold metal in his palm, and he doesn’t speak, holding his breath until he can be sure that when he exhales, he pushes Dolarhyde from him in his entirety, leaving nothing but Will behind.

            He’s pretty sure he succeeded, although there is enough doubt that he can’t speak for several more seconds.

            “The child hid underneath the bed, but he knew to drag him out to shoot him. The child on the left died first, the child on the right died second. They were left here, and he returned,” he manages when he can ensure his voice doesn’t tremble. The light and sound and air and color of the child lingers where he died, and as Will stands he swings a leg over the space to try and disperse it.

            “He knew that they were here,” the annotator says quietly. Will glances to them, relieved to see their head down. If they take note of how his hands shake, they say nothing.

            “He’d have watched the house. There was no hesitation in his movements to the bed, so he knew exactly where to go,” he agrees.

            He walks from the room, and he forces himself to enter the bedroom where the air is dank and heavy. There is a hunger, lethal and plaintive, and it sits just over the space where the most blood has collected. There is so much of it that it’s not quite dry, wet and puddled in the center. He doesn’t want to lay his hands near it; he knows, he _knows_ what happened next, and he doesn’t want to see.

            The spaces along the blood glow faintly in his eyes though, and the walls come tumbling down before he can even press his hands down.

            _Mirrors rest over your eyes; can you see? Can you see? Brown eyes stare, dark with hunger, but the walls do not fall away from me as I look into them. I am trapped, barricaded in, but I am not alone with the sounds of the hunger, I am not alone with the sounds of the dying. Can you see me?_

_Can you see?_

_I look at you, and I see your life playing out before me: the sounds you make as you fuck, the tone you take when you scold. Are you not aware of me the way I am aware of you? You who looks through these mirrors, can you see the bruises deep down beneath my skin, the sensation of a belt that hits and hits and hits and hits…?_

_The walls will not lower, but even awake I can Dream your life like it is my own; my wedding, my anniversary, my children, my husband. They’re not_ mine _though, they’re yours, but who are you? Where do you end and I begin?_

_Can you see? Can you look into my eyes and see me?_

He’s pressed against the wall behind him before he is aware of the action, before he even feels his legs move. He grounds himself through tactile sensations, the gloves tight against his skin, the way his pants press to his thighs, the way his shirt tag itches on his neck. It is much harder to come back from the feeling of his hands gliding across Mrs. Perkins’ bare form, and the walls don’t feel so sturdy anymore.

            “Are the mirrors in the bathroom broken?” he rasps.

            “Every mirror in the house,” the annotator says.

            “He broke the mirrors, placed shards over the eyes, mouth, and clitoris; he performed necrophilic acts upon Mrs. Perkins’, then placed the bodies as seen in the photos.”

            “Necrophilic acts,” they murmur, writing furiously.

            “He placed pajama pants on Mr. Perkins –he’d originally slept in his underwear.”

            He stays pressed against the wall as he speaks, like he can somehow melt through it if he tries hard enough. His hands feel like they’re gripping dead flesh.

            “The bite marks are not sexual,” he says to the room. “There is no center suck bruise, nor was that his intent. It’s possessive.”

            “What is your name?” the annotator looks up from their writing and studies him intently.

            “I am Will Graham,” he assures them.

            He’s let out of the room with that confirmation that he has made his barriers firm, and he wanders down the hall dazedly, studying the faint glow of footsteps that trail not out of the door but to the fridge. He presses a palm to it, cringing at the sensation of a casual feeling of physical hunger, and he opens the door and stares at the Baby Belle cheese wheel half-eaten. He grabs his glove, sets the cheese on the counter with it, and continues on.

            He stands outside underneath the sunlight, staring up at the blinding clear day. In the south, it isn’t as cold although it’s fall, and he takes off his light jacket, laying it over his arm. Dolarhyde was tired after all of his hard work; he’d gone out to look at the moon. It refueled him, charged him. Will plants his feet where Dolarhyde rested, and he flexes and curls his hands to try and dispel the feeling of mirror shards on his palms.

            “It’s Dolarhyde?” Jack Crawford asks. Will senses more than hears his approach.

            “Yes.”

            Jack swears, staring out at the beautifully fenced back yard.

            “What set him off?”

            “Someone bruised and whipped him,” he says, “but that feels like a long time ago. He’s building, creating.”

            “Creating what?”

            “Something. I can’t see it yet, but it’s very special to him.”

            “Does it feel like he’s lost reality?” Jack wonders. It’s a weary sort of question. Most rogue agents become so ingrained within their delusions that they have no grasp on reality, the walls not only down but non-existent, as though they never were. They have a sense of the entire world, so much so that they are the world and all of the fibers holding it together.

            “No. He’s very much aware. He feels that he’s transcended; he’s trying to Become.”

            “Become?”

            “Yes. That’s…I can’t see more yet. Where’s his house?”

            “We can get you on a plane tomorrow back to DC.”

            Will nods, mulling over the feeling of teeth in his mouth that are his but not his. “There’s cheese in there. The bite marks look oblong, weird, but I don’t think his teeth had that sort of deformity.”

            “Did you work with him?”

            “Maybe once,” Will says. “I think I remember him at the academy, but not well.”

            “The academy,” Jack murmurs.

            The academy was a government funded institution for empaths; by law, children showing signs for the gift were to be tested, and if found to fall into the empath category, were sent to learn how to control and hone in on their gifts. It was never mandatory that they work within government positions like the FBI, but someone with a certificate from the academy who looked to those professions found themselves fast-tracked to the top of the applicant list and given a hefty pay raise above others if hired.

            One look at Will as an E-3, and they’d all but salivated at the thought of him working with the FBI, no matter his mental instability.

            “An RA in a small town like this isn’t going to go over well,” Will tells Jack. “This is that cliché town where nothing bad never happens to no one.”

            “The police department all but begged us to take this,” Jack agrees. “Full cooperation. Do you think you can handle tracking an RA while we look more into the murders here?”

            _Do you think you can handle tracking someone that you may very well end up becoming one day?_

“That’s my job, Jack,” Will says. “I hunt RA’s. Dozens. This should be no different.”

            Standing in the sun, trying to let it warm his chilled skin, Will Graham has a distinct feeling that he may have unintentionally lied to Jack Crawford, saying that. He doesn’t rescind his statement, though. He couldn’t if he’d tried.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for all of your support for this fic! I've always been a sucker for a fantasy type story, so this one and the soulmate au really have a special place in my heart! :) You guys are amazing.


	4. What Validations We Seek

Chapter 4:

            It’s late when the flight gets back from Georgia, and Will sleeps in one of the bunks at the EBAU rather than make the drive home. He has his own blanket and pillowcase that no one touches, and he sets them up on the bunk before he sleeps. Sometimes, laying his head in the space where someone else slept gave him the ability to see their dreams if he didn’t layer his own things accordingly.

            It’s not their dreams that wake him in the early morning, though; thankfully, it’s not his sordid, dark ones, either.

            It’s Hannibal Lecter.

            He opens the door to the room and squints, sleep still clinging to him. The knocking hadn’t been overly repetitious, although it’d been firm enough that it’d jolted him from a dream where he’d been lost in a maze of ever-growing hedges. Lecter stands the way he’s come to expect a therapist to stand –back straight, shoulders back, and expression placidly open. When Will stares at him, he notes the lack of animal hair on the leg of his trousers, the smell of breakfast cooked an hour or so before, and a cologne of rich, careful selection. He sees things one would only see in having to look with their real eyes rather than his metaphorical ones. It’s an interesting sensation, and it brings him one step farther out of the cobwebs that cling to his mind.

            “Good morning, Will,” he says cheerfully.

            “Where’s Crawford?” Will asks. He glances past Lecter, sliding his glasses on. “Or Bloom?”

            “Agent Crawford is deposed in court, and Dr. Bloom is seeing one of her patients today,” Hannibal replies. “I was allowed into the headquarters to see you here.”

            “I have work.”

            “Then the adventure will be ours,” Hannibal decides. “If you don’t mind, of course.”

            Will minds very much, Hannibal’s decision to make his work their adventure, but he lets him into the small rest room all the same. The tabs on Beverly’s tablet still contain his articles. Thankfully, it sits closed so that Dr. Lecter can’t see. He's not sure what the good doctor would think of him reading his things, let alone knowing he's now reread them about four or five times.

            It’s a haphazard version of the FBI, what with the scattered tables and the bunkbeds assembled against the walls. It’s for any agent working at HQ with long hours, but years before it’d melded into the sort of space that only empaths used when the work became too much. Neurotypicals tended to avoid the place entirely.

            There is an empath sleeping in the corner with bad dreams, and when Will glances to his distraught face, he can see the edges of terror, the whisper of someone chasing and chasing and chasing and not letting the empath get away _this time_.

            He looks away and quickly pulls his gloves on before getting dressed. The clothes from the day before will have to do.

            Just across from him, pinned to the wall, is a picture of four people posed with a sense of comradery. They’re meant to be empaths, with their wide smiles and eager eyes, and the caption beneath it says, ‘Yes, we can!’ Will eyes it with a curl to his lip as he laces up his shoes. None of the people in the picture are empaths.

            They don’t speak as he makes coffee and sees himself out of HQ, jacket buttoned against a cool breeze and a whisper that Abigail Hobbs still hasn’t woken up. They stand on the steps, and he tries to wake himself up, small shakes of his shoulders and feet that rock him forward, then back.

            “I’ve got an RA,” he says. At Lecter’s furrowed brow, he explains, “Rogue agent. If they didn’t tell you, that’s what I do here, for the FBI. I track rogue agents.”

            “They send empaths after rogue agents?” he asks, surprised.

            “They send empaths after empath rogue agents,” Will clarifies. “If it’s an E-1, they send an E-2. If it’s an E-2, they send another E-2 with countering talents, or an E-3.”

            “Where you are the only E-3, I’m sure most of the responsibility of E-2’s falls directly to you, or if it is a particularly difficult E-1, they’ll ask for your help.”

            Will nods, staring out at a small scattering of agents walking in a not-quite group. He can spot the empaths from the way they walk close enough to seem ‘together’, but distanced by instinct, by habit. No one tries to move too near to them, and they maintain a guise of blending into the crowd without being the crowd. All empaths have that talent, to attempt at being the crowd while never being able to be _part_ of the crowd.

            “Most of them resent me,” he says. Lecter looks amused, and he hurries on to say, “Not because of my abilities. Empaths don’t tend to draw lines like that. It’s because they know that if they step out too far, Jack sends me after them.”

            “You represent what happens if they cannot maintain control,” Hannibal realizes. “How do you find your own methods of control, Agent Graham? How did you regain control of yourself after you killed Garrett Jacob Hobbs?”

            Will wants to say that he builds forts; that he is quite capable of maintaining control and placing walls between him and the man he murdered. He glances to Hannibal’s face, notes the serene expression of someone that is impartial, someone that asks because he’d said it was alright to ask. He can’t say these things to Jack; he sure as hell won’t say them to Director Hansen. There’s something appealing about saying them to someone that another empath can’t walk up to and pry the words from simply by looking into their eyes. There’s something appealing about saying the truth to someone like Hannibal Lecter.

            “…Someone put my gloves on for me,” he reveals, quiet. Ashamed. “And…I had a sensation like I was killing myself. Like I’d put the knife to my own throat and…” He makes a cutting motion with his free hand. “I just laid there, trying to build the walls up, trying to…come back into my own head, and I couldn’t. Agent Crawford had to haul me up and drag me from the cabin before I could even realize that I was Will Graham and not Garrett Jacob Hobbs or Abigail Hobbs.”

            “Do you feel that you have some semblance of control now?”

            He knows the right thing to say, so he says it, otherwise he’ll be placed before his director and forced to face the music. “I’m in control now,” he lies.

            No one has time for an E-3 that can’t maintain control. He heads down the steps to his car, and Dr. Hannibal Lecter follows.

-

            He’s smiling as they pull up to Dolarhyde’s address, and Will can’t feel his amusement as he looks at him.

            “What’s so funny?” He’s never had to ask that before. Normally, in a simple glance he can see the reason behind the smile, the rhyme behind the flicker of light in someone’s eye. He steadfastly ignores the mild sensation of just how it feels to have to ask –almost pleasant in the sense of ignorance.

            “You see the police raids on television, you see empaths appearing in court to reveal the thoughts behind a murderer’s blank gaze, and you see the FBI releasing news to the press about terrorism,” Hannibal says, climbing out of the car. “Yet now I’m able to see the work that leads to that sort of media reveal. It’s like peeking behind the curtain in _The Wizard of Oz_.”

            “His name is Francis Dolarhyde,” he says, walking up to the fence. He hands the file to Lecter, reasons that if Lecter can keep his head on straight, he has every reason to see the file. “Attended the EA from the age of ten up to graduation, fast tracked through university. Worked in the Marine Corps for four years, chose not to renew his contract and instead began FBI training and education. A Field Agent, E-2 Seer and Dreamer that worked as an empath inspector. If empaths began showing signs of any form in instability, he investigated the situation to deem whether or not their position in the FBI needed to be reevaluated.”

            “They allow empaths to work in the field like that?”

            “Some of them. He’d have been tested extensively.” Will had been tested extensively. He stops at the fence that he has to open in order to walk up to the front door, and he stares for a long time up at the bleak, aged house. While Hannibal reads over the dossier, Will removes his gloves and delicately places them in his coat pocket. He flexes his fingers, studying the space Dolarhyde occupied once as a place of rest.

            His hands pass along the latch to open the fence, and he is a mailman, striding forward to drop off a necessary bit of mail. The feeling is bleak, a smear of a memory, and it’s cast aside as he walks up the path towards the house. The grass is aged, yellowed, more crab grass and weeds than anything, and when the wind blows, dandelion seeds scatter and cling to the bottom of his pants.

            He touches the railing as he walks up the steps, but there is nothing but a faint, echoing whisper that the rail has been used before. Someone was fatigued when touching it, but then it is gone. At the small mailbox by the door, mail is stuffed in. He doesn’t touch it; he knows the mailman is losing his patience, having to cram more and more mail in with no one to retrieve it.

            “Can you feel everything?”

            “Not everything. Not even I’m omnipotent,” he replies. He jiggles the handle, not surprised to find it locked. To the amusement of Hannibal, he retrieves a key from his pocket and unlocks it, walking in.

            “Do you have keys to the homes of every agent?”

            “Every empath.”

            It’s not lost on him that the right to privacy doesn’t exist as far as the FBI is concerned with empaths. Although it’s fair, seeing as how the FBI doesn’t think any citizen has a right to privacy –if you’re doing nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear.

            Right?

            It’s taken a step farther with empaths, though. Copies of their house keys, the right to read through any and all mail if they behave in a manner ‘questioning of the integrity of the FBI’, an ability to control just where they receive medical aid if the need arises. Will hasn’t had to endure any of their invasive behavior, but he is well aware of the ability for that to change at any time. Perks of the job and all.

            The air inside is stagnant, the house not entirely clean but not quite cluttered enough to be considered messy. There’s an odd smell, something like musk, dry sweat and copper, and Will stands in the entryway, inhaling it. He passes hands along a dusty end table where odds and ends, knick-knacks from the fifties rest, a weird feeling of bitter nostalgia that curves around him as though he is standing in a tunnel.

            “There is not much in the way of information from his time before he came to the institution,” Hannibal says. It’s a jarring noise in the otherwise quiet, and Will manages a small hum of agreement, walking over a creaky step. The walls in his mind are slowly falling away with the sort of hesitation due when dealing with a strange place, but as he walks into the living room they’re completely obliterated in the wake of the fury.

            Where the entryway had the sensation of a grandmother meticulously displaying her small bit of worth, the living room is that dream gone wrong. A floral print couch lays decimated by what could only be a hefty axe, the wall paper curling in desolate strips from the wall. Pottery lay smashed in shards, picture frames scattered across the floor. There is an untouched recliner that sits as a stark juxtaposition to the otherwise destroyed living room, and Will picks his way through, sitting down on it.

            _Lies, lies, lies is this place that I rest, where I lay my head. They don’t know; they can never know, and I take my secrets to the grave while I drag the rest of them with me_.

            He tries to delve deeper, but the feeling is old, although strong. Will passes fingertips over faded arm rests, curls his bottom lip in and bites it at the sense of an honest, horrific injustice.

            “Did Dolarhyde do this?”

            “They say it’s easier to just refer to them as an RA,” Will says after a prolonged silence. “You need to distance yourself from them, Dr. Lecter.”

            “Are they afraid that if we don’t distance ourselves, we will grow to pity them and excuse their actions?”

            “Yes.” Will is mildly pleased to hear that Lecter doesn’t say ‘you’, but humors him and says ‘us’. Like Lecter has to be the one to force up walls inside of his mind.

            They’re down, though, and as Will looks about he can see the path Dolarhyde paved, furious in his actions, a twisted form of justice his adrenaline as he took an axe to everything he owned –no, not owned. Gained. This was his house, but it certainly wasn’t his home.

            He continues on, moving from the living room to a dining room where the hollowed remains of an extravagant dinner lay. Bits of food still on the plates were a breeding ground for maggots, and he stares at their hungry but lazy path on the plate for longer than he should.

            In the kitchen he finds nothing but more dirty plates, although as his bare hands pass along the door he pauses. He palms it, focuses on the glowing pulse on the knob. There’s a desperation to the feeling of throwing the door open, a heady taste of betrayal. Fear.

            “He came in through the back, not the front,” he says. “Last he was here.”

            “Can you feel how long ago that was?” Rather than the annotator that echoed him as they wrote, Lecter is engaging. Somehow, that’s more grounding to Will, to have to think as himself rather than someone else in the moments with his walls down.

            “Before he killed the Perkins family,” Will says after a thought. “This is older than the feelings and thoughts of his murders there.”

            “So he came home first, then made his way to the Perkins?”

            “Why the Perkins, though?” Will wonders out loud. “Why them? He had to travel to them, take time for them…”

            “Perhaps Agent Crawford’s work studying the Perkins will give insight to the why, when you meet with him once more to tell him the where and how of your RA.”

            Will nods in agreement, continues on towards the hall that leads upstairs. There are shattered shards along the plush but old carpet, and Will looks down to see his eyes reflected up. Dolarhyde smashed the mirrors.

            Bedrooms lay empty, spaces where someone once was but never again would be. Will stands in the tepid space of each one until he can confirm that Dolarhyde didn’t enter there in his haste to destroy certain aspects of this place in which he felt so confined.

            He starts to enter the master bedroom and pauses at the doorway. Inside, the terrifying sense of panic lays.

            “What do you feel?” Hannibal asks when he doesn’t walk in.

            Will grips the doorway with his bare hands, trembles in the wake of a dread that is cloying, grasping. There is no escape. There is no end. There was an end, but there is no more, utterly destroyed in the wake of this time that reaches and reaches, and he’d been stupid enough to reach back. He stares ahead to the faint, ever-so faint impressions of someone rushing through the room, leaving dresser drawers hanging out, a small chair near a vanity overturned. The bed is a disastrous mess of things thrown, things left forgotten in haste, and it’s there that he walks to, crawling onto the lumpy, aged material to lay down.

            It’s there that the fear abates, a lulling and steady wave that crashes over, then recedes. In the dip in the center where someone slept the most, he lays back and trembles, one palm pressed to a ratty coverlet, the other palm pressed to a forgotten jacket. Although faded, old from passed time, there is a sensation that this is the only place Dolarhyde could settle his mind, settle the racing thoughts inside as he sees and dreams.

            “He’s afraid,” he says when he can speak.

            “What does he fear here, Agent Graham?”

            “There is…information he’s found. Something he’s learned that he can’t reconcile. It’s…thrown everything to question, and he’s…reverted.”

            “Reverted to what?”

            “To the death,” Will murmurs. “He has to run. He has to run, but where to, he…isn’t quite sure yet. Maybe _I’m_ just not seeing it. But here is where…he slept.”

            “Your rogue agent found something of great import that caused him to revert to a space where he was the monster rather than see it in someone else,” Hannibal says, and he doesn’t enter the room. “What was he investigating when he didn’t report back?”

            Will climbs off of the bed when he’s sure the fear surrounding it won’t overwhelm him, and he walks out of the room, looking around.

            “That’s what I need to find out, I suppose,” he says, heading back down the stairs. After a beat, Hannibal follows.

            When they’re outside, he dares to ask, “Did they ask you to follow me around, Dr. Lecter? Jack afraid I’m not going to be able to handle it?”

            It’s a taunting, jabbing sort of question, declared with bared teeth and an unironic gesture towards the door he’s locked behind himself.

            “Yes.” He doesn’t seem perturbed to be so honest and direct, blunt and unhesitating in his answer.

            “What are you going to tell them?”

            “You seem perfectly capable of recreating your barriers and walls, even in the face of emotion that stopped you in your tracks. I would inform them that if they’re searching for a psychiatric stamp of approval, they certainly have it.”

            Will nods, not sure if he’s happy to hear that, or if it’s some sort of sign that Lecter has as much trouble seeing his mind as he has in seeing into Lecter’s. There’s the chance that he’s being generous, that if he says it enough then Will will actually gain the ability to build effective walls.

            “Are you going to keep following me around?” he asks instead, heading towards the car.

            “For an indefinite amount of time, yes.”

            Will nods, accepting this rather than fighting it. He did give the good doctor the okay to have conversations.

            “Coffee, then?”

            “Coffee sounds wonderful, Agent Graham.”

-

            Jack returns from court to see Will waiting in his office, gloved and dozing in his chair a few hours later. It’s the sound of his briefcase hitting the desk that jolts him up, and he blinks rapidly and looks around blearily, adjusting the glasses set crookedly on his face.

            “You’re back,” Jack says by way of greeting.

            “Dolarhyde hasn’t returned to the house since the Perkins. He’s scared and trying to hole up somewhere.”

            “He’s scared,” Jack repeated.

            “He’s found some information while undercover that really spooked him,” he says, shifting to get comfortable in the chair. “When I asked for the files, they wouldn’t give them to me. Who was he investigating?”

            “Why do you need to know what the information was?” Jack asks, sitting down. It’s the way he shifts as he sits, adjusting himself and busying his hands that tips Will off. He can all but smell the unease coming off of him.

            Dolarhyde isn’t the only one that’s spooked.

            “…If I know what made him so afraid, I can find out where he’d go,” he says slowly. His eyes track the hands that try to open a small pack of trail mix, yanking down so hard that Jack almost spills it across the desk.

            “I know it’s a classified operation,” Jack says after uttering a short curse. “All of Dolarhyde’s work was.”

            “Right.”

            “Out of my jurisdiction sort of classification,” he tacks on after looking at Will’s unimpressed expression.

            “Jack,” Will warns. “I have a hard time believing anything is out of your jurisdiction.”

            “This is.”

            “Then so is my help,” Will decides, standing up.

            “Excuse me?” Jack looks up from his trail mix, and the stubborn, set expression on his face is one Will has seen a thousand times.

            “You asked if I can handle it, and I can’t handle not being able to do my job because of some internal political bull shit,” he says. “I’m not crawling into his head half-assed. Don’t make me do that and then not help by refusing to fill in the blanks.”

            The air turns heavy as they look at one another, Will focusing on his mouth rather than his eyes. He knows that if he looks at his eyes, he’ll see everything he needs –maybe even the information Jack claims is confidential. It’s not enough of a risk for him to try and look, though; he’s seen enough times into Jack’s mind that he, without fail, falls into the same memory, and it’s not a memory he wants to see at the moment. He’s not in enough control.

            “You’re a pain in my ass,” Jack says with a sigh of defeat. “I’ll talk to Kade Purnell –she’s the director of EI.”

            “Thanks for letting me do my job,” Will says, and he walks out before Jack can snap back.

-

            He doesn’t go out with co-workers when they are kind enough to invite him out for drinks. Drinks mean bars, bars means people, and the amount of people that have climbed inside of the bone arena of his skull are enough to leave him exhausted, worn thin like a fraying, old shirt.

            Instead, he drives to Wolf Trap and greets the dogs that rush out from the house when he opens the door, dropping down onto the porch to give them each the attention they deserve. They are kind, lapping at his shirt rather than his face, and his gloved hands rub spots they couldn’t have scratched themselves.

            Dogs are kinder than people, he thinks as he sits outside with a glass of whiskey and lets them run around. Their love is a pure thing, and when one of them licks his wrist, he only gains the impression of their wanting more treats than he’s willing to share at the moment. As a pack, they are a singular, cohesive unit rather than too many individuals existing within the same space. Alana has made it clear she thinks he has too many of them, but whenever another stray turns up, he can’t find it in his heart to do anything more than let them stay.

            Dogs, in all of their love and understanding, are far better than people.

            He cleans up a dinner for one, feeds the dogs again and finds himself hunkered around another boat engine from someone down the road that couldn’t afford to take to a shop. The wind outside glances off of old windowpanes, makes them shake, and he thinks of the sounds the cabin made when he’d rushed in, not knowing what he’d find. The cabin was quieter than his house, at peace with the monstrous death inside of it. When he finds himself staring down at his clenched, blood-stained hands rather than greasy hands holding tools, he decides it’s time for bed. Redirect, redirect, redirect.

            When he goes to climb into bed, he finds Abigail Hobbs bleeding to death on one side and Mrs. Perkins bleeding to death on the other. He sighs, considers them both for a long moment, then crawls in between the two of them to try and get some sleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for all of the love this has gotten! Now that 2 fics are finished and 1 more is wrapping up, This will become a weekly update --it looks like Mondays seem to be best for me! :)


	5. What Games We Play

Chapter 5:

            Hannibal Lecter’s office is the product of a man that drowns in aesthetics. When Will is allowed in from a small waiting room, he learns more about Dr. Lecter by how he decorates than how he interacts. There is a sense of vertigo, Will’s having to look around to learn about someone rather than simply look into their eyes to see. He knows of several empaths that would have been annoyed at the shift, at the sense of tilting over as their world and all of its truths changed.

            Will harbors no such feelings. After his readings on Dr. Lecter, he is more than eager to learn by visual directions rather than empath-impressions. It’s a hunger he won’t deny himself, seeing as how he’s never been able to entertain it before.

            “Are you going to sit down?” Lecter asks him as he peruses books ranging from Dante to Doyle to Bronte. He pauses on one whose spine is mildly abused, and he pulls the book out in order to open it, curious.

            “You like Blake,” he says, glancing back to Lecter seated in a leather upholstered chair.

            “I do,” he agrees, and if he minds Will’s pacing and perusing, it doesn’t show on his face. That sort of uncertainty, that sense of _unknowing_ , makes him wander about more, glancing over everything with a sort of hunger that distracts him from the fact that he didn’t get much sleep the night before.

            “Cruelty has a human heart, and jealousy a human face,” he tells Lecter absentmindedly beside a loud paneling of curtains. He thumbs through the book, feeling pages with gloved hands. He wonders what sort of impressions he’d take from touching the pages with his fingertips unclothed, but he doesn’t do it. There is something exciting, eager about his thoughts at the realization that for the first time in forever, he’ll have to make an educated guess.

            Hannibal Lecter interests him far more than he’s willing to let on.

            “Terror the human form divine, and Secresy the human dress,” Hannibal finishes for him. “ _A Divine Image_ , William Blake. Tell me about Agent Hobbs, Agent Graham.”

            “Are you asking if he had a cruel, human heart with a jealous human face?” he asks, pausing beside a stag whose heft of brass carving looks heavy enough to be troublesome if it ever fell over. He glides the back of his free hand along the curve of the flank, staring at the intricate details along its neck, the intelligent look rendered in its carved eyes.

            “You know him best of all, since you tracked him. The news didn’t make it public that he was a rogue agent, therefore I was mildly surprised when you told me that.”

            Will logs it away that Hannibal Lecter’s surprise is so well hidden that when he’d first told him of Hobbs, it hadn’t shown in the slightest. He’ll have to get better at reading his face, learn the small tics and twitches of it. “The FBI doesn’t like it to be public that despite their best efforts, empaths aren’t the most solid of choices for field work.”

            “Why use you, then, if it’s so utterly dangerous?”

            “The man hours alone that it saves in using us saves the government, and thereby the people, billions of dollars. The equipment used in the labs that can be set aside for only the more complicated or necessary work that normally costs hundreds to thousands for use or operation is another money saver, and even with our higher pay and mental compensation plans, it ultimately saves the most money to use us than to not.”

            “The mental strain alone ultimately breaks most empaths in the end, though,” Lecter points out.

            “Saves money on retirement, then, too,” Will retorts.

            “As we can see with the late Agent Hobbs,” Lecter replies after a beat, dryly. “What caused him to go rogue?”

            Will peruses a small section of books dedicated to art work, and he finds William Blake once more. He takes that book from the shelf, curiosity making him turn pages, thumbing through to find ones with the most faded edges, one touched by hands of reverence or eagerness. What art moves Dr. Lecter? What gives him inspiration, voice, _essence_?

            “…He was retiring soon,” he says, and he glances over to Lecter to gauge his reaction to Will touching his things. His expression is impassive, his deep-set eyes intent but not narrowed. Will marvels at the ability to study, to see without _seeing_ , and he makes his way closer, feet sinking into the plush and intricate design of a floor rug as he stands opposite of Lecter. He doesn’t sit just yet, though. “He had a standard, six-month mental evaluation, like we all do in order to test our mental state. He didn’t pass, and with his daughter graduating high school as well, it was decided that he would be better suited retiring and going home to help her with that rather than continue work that he couldn’t do and do well.”

            “Do you think the retirement caused him to lose sight of everything that he deemed important?”

            “I think it was a catalyst, but the retirement was because he was losing his grasp on reality even before he starting killing. In his evaluation, he discussed his daughter with a behavior and dialogue verging on obsessive, and he referred to their time together as a form of honoring who she was and what she was. Her upcoming graduation, coupled with a red stamp of disapproval on his sheet were only the straws to ultimately break the camel’s back, not some singular moment that made him fantasize about killing.”

            “Was it killing, in his mind?” Hannibal asks. Will handles the two books, shifts and paces along the rug in order to study a painting on the wall depicting two women in a glade beside a well. He stares at the painting, at the oil on canvas rendered with care and adoration, and he shakes his head whether Hannibal can see it or not.

            “He was honoring them, and in doing so, honored her,” he says slowly. “They thought that his retirement would give him the time to spend with her before she left, but that sudden shift in a life plan, coupled with what he thought to be a loss of his daughter, pushed him over, and the intrusive thoughts and dreams he’d already struggled with took hold until he couldn’t see his way out anymore.”

            “You told Dr. Bloom that he wasn’t like most psychopathic empaths –the title for them is, of course, in itself a paradox.”

            “He’s not,” Will says it, realizes he’s speaking as though Hobbs is still alive. “He… _was_ sensitive. His delusions, his dreams made him believe that he was honestly honoring those girls, giving them something beyond themselves as he found a way to connect to his daughter without having to hurt her. He tried to make their deaths as painless as possible.”

            “In comparison, you shooting him will have felt far more jarring after you experienced the form of care that he gave to his victims while giving him no such respect in his own demise.”

            The fact that he can see that, the fact that Lecter says those words with such assurance, such confidence is staggering, and Will turns back to him to stare, swallowing down a noise of indignation and surprise. He meets Dr. Lecter’s gaze and it holds for far longer than he’s ever held a gaze with someone –such things would have normally pulled him into the dark depths of the iris, the knowing place where ugly things were left to rot inside of the mind. With Lecter, though, he isn’t drawn in; instead, he notes the pleased crinkles near his eyes, the faintest of twitches near his lips that suggests he knows exactly what Will is doing, roaming around touching his things.

            Dr. Lecter doesn’t mind it in the least.

            If anything, he seems amused to see Will invade his space with the behavior of someone that is used to doing that for a living with no one to stop them. Will finds it in himself to sit down, still holding both the book of art and the book of poetry like shields against Lecter’s immense sense of _knowing_.

            “She was his golden ticket,” Will finds himself saying. “He was about to destroy it because all else was lost. The FBI took his job, his future, his plans, his…aspirations, left him to go home where life itself was taking away the one pride and joy he had, and in his mind they let him go to watch the only thing he had left leave him. I can unequivocally understand him, but I don’t regret killing him.”

            “No, in the heat of the moment, I’d almost say you enjoyed it.”

            He rears back in his chair, gripping the books tightly at that. There is no indication of judgement or censure in those words, just a calm and almost detached tone to it, like Lecter is commenting on the particularly pretty shade of blue in a pair of off brand dress slacks.

            “…Killing is the ugliest thing in the world,” he finds himself saying. Slow, purposeful. Like he has had to recite the words in his head several times before forcing them out.

            “There is something beautiful in its power, though; we inherited our capacity for violence and cruelty from our human ancestors, not our animal ancestors. There is something to be said to be able to enjoy it from an artistic perspective, as you tend to have to do when you look into the eyes of a fellow empath and see how they felt in killing.”

            “Trying to trap me, doctor?” Will taunts lightly. “Going to tell Jack I’ve an itch for killing people now because of Agent Hobbs?”

            “On the contrary, my intent is to show you the many ways in which you can understand that killing, for all of its horrific nature, the ugliness you see it to be, can also be purposeful, right. You’re allowed to take pleasure in the way you took control of your circumstances and saved your life as well as the life of Abigail Hobbs. That in no way makes you the monster your mind would have you be.”

            “’The Caverns of the Grave I’ve seen, and these I show’d to England’s Queen. But now the Caves of Hell I view, Who shall I dare to show them to?’” Will quotes Blake, fingers tapping lightly over the cover. Hannibal considered him, head tilting slightly to the other side, almost animalistic in nature, before he smiles, a clever and engaging sort of thing.

            “Me, Agent Graham; you show them to me.”

            When he sees Will out from a second door used for patient exits, Will goes to return the books he’d thumbed through. He’s surprised when Dr. Lecter refuses, instead pushing them back towards Will’s chest with that same damned, ambiguous smile he wore for the rest of their conversation.

            “Please, Agent Graham, you’ve certainly earned the time and leisure to look through those as you like. Return them when you’ve found what you’re looking for.”

            Later, setting them alongside Beverly’s tablet with Dr. Lecter’s articles in the journals, he wonders what exactly he’s looking for that the good doctor seems to know everything about.

-

            He gets coffee with Alana because she insists, and because she’s a good enough friend he’d hate to disappoint or worry her. It’s a small shop that deserves more customers than it has, what with the fair prices and elegant, old-fashioned way of making coffee, but Will is glad for it. It’s just them, the woman running the counter, and a couple tucked into the corner with their Sudoku and their crosswords.

            “Hannibal tells me he’s met with you a few times,” she says, stirring a chai latte. Time has made it so that he hardly has to look at her to see what she’s feeling or thinking. Relief and pleasure are a film on the table that wasn’t quite wiped clean.

            “Yes.”

            “Has it helped?”

            “Did you know about his ability to be unread by empaths?” Will wonders out loud. He doesn’t have to wait for an answer. He glances to her mouth, sees the guilt at keeping what she’d consider a secret. “I didn’t ask, therefore you didn’t tell me.”

            “I figured you wouldn’t believe until you saw,” she says with a nod.

            “That’s true.”

            “Has it helped, Will?” she presses when he says nothing else. “He went with you when you went to the RA’s home.”

            “That’s his house, but it’s not his home. There’s somewhere else he keeps his secrets.”

            That’s how it was with empaths, although the look of confusion on Alana’s face tells him she doesn’t quite follow his train of thought. Dreamers in particular, like Dolarhyde, are trained to build walls, to create safe spaces within safe spaces. Although he couldn’t hide his fear, he could build enough walls with his dreams that he could hide his secrets and save them for another place.

            “Jack is getting me information regarding what he was working on before he went rogue, and another agent sent me an address to a place he liked to frequent between jobs,” he continues rather than explain what he meant. “Dr. Lecter wants to follow along.”

            He doesn’t reveal that he doesn’t mind as much as he thought he would, Lecter’s following along. After visiting Dolarhyde’s house, he didn’t say much over coffee, allowing Will to mull over what he’d felt and seen. Someone betrayed Dolarhyde, that much was certain –whether on purpose or not, he couldn’t say, but it was a betrayal all the same. After their conversation at Lecter’s office, his ability to _know_ that Will enjoyed killing Hobbs, there is a sense of something odd, something alluring in the manner in which he tracked Will throughout his office, gleaning more information from Will than Will thought he’d gained from Lecter.

            It was a little exciting, if he was being completely honest with himself.

            “He’s worked with empaths before, and he was my mentor in school. Apart from his professional recommendations, I put my stamp on him.”

            It means more to him that she recommends him than anyone else, although he’s not sure if he should say that. His level of comfort around certain people is something he holds close, not using words to express how much or little someone means to him. That creates vulnerability, and Will has had enough with vulnerability, with letting too much in. He’s had to share a bed with two dead bodies; he doesn’t want to imagine a third, one alive and needing validation of his friendship.

            “He’s smart,” he allows after he finishes his coffee. “I read his work.”

            “All of it?”

            He doesn’t want to admit that _yes_ , of course he’d read every single published piece. “A bit. He seems to understand empaths differently than others. He doesn’t fear us.”

            “People don’t fear empaths,” she says, but at his cross look, she amends hastily, “at least, not the way you imply. No one likes their secrets being exposed by a simple glance. No one likes thinking that if someone touches them, they know everything.”

            “No one likes an empath going rogue and killing people,” he says sarcastically.

            “You’ll find your RA,” Alana assures him.

            “I was talking about me.”

            That takes her by mild surprise, and she has to think about his words for awhile before she can find something to say to try and comfort him. Will isn’t looking for comfort, though; when he gets a call from Jack to meet him at a crime scene, he figures he’s looking for something similar to comfort, but something that doesn’t ache so much on the way down.

-

            It’s an open field with tall grass swaying in the wind, a cool breeze to whisper the cold day that it’s going to be. Will takes his jacket off and rolls up his shirt sleeves to really bask in the feeling of the environment around him, and he picks his way around a few vehicles to walk along a path stamped down from use. There isn’t a cloud in the sky, and the sun bears down on his gloved hands. When a bit of stray wheat dances and brushes against his arm, he can feel the pressure of a grasshopper leaping, of a doe rushing with wild panic. He twitches away from it and continues on his path.

            Jack has had enough time to make sure the crime scene is ‘safe’ for him, and Will steps around a few police officers in order to take in the scene. It’s a bit nauseating, and the coffee roils in his stomach, but he forces himself to look because that’s his job and that’s what he does so wonderfully well.

            “Whenever you’re ready,” the annotator tells him.

            Sometimes he wonders if it’s a test from the FBI, the things he’s seen and the death he’s witnessed secondhand. Surely no one would take a young woman and throw her onto the head of a stag; surely the FBI merely wants to test his mettle, his obedience to them when they ask him to look at things like this. As he circles her, arms splayed in supplication to the heavens above, he knows that such thoughts are nothing but paranoia, though –he’s seen enough into the hearts and minds of mankind to know that there are plenty of people that, given half the chance, would eat someone alive if it got them one step ahead.

            He inhales the stench of open wounds, of a chest cavity missing a vital piece for life, and after removing his gloves, he presses his hands into the blood, throwing walls down rather than letting them fall on their own time.

            _You are nothing._

_You think of yourself rather highly, as any with privilege does; this is not so, though. Through these actions of mine, I’ve reduced you to what you truly are –a pig, as easy to kill as the swine to the slaughter, as malleable as clay as I slice down your chest and break past the ribs to remove what gives life anew through each breath. Are we not more than flesh and bone? Yes, yes; as life was so given to you, I take away and give myself at my leisure, at my pleasure._

Will opens his eyes, and the woman before him –Cassie Boyle, his mind provides –still lives. She struggles, but he holds tight, and brown eyes meet his with the sort of panic and fear one gives when they know just how close they dance the line to death.

            He doesn’t smile at her, nor does he taunt her. His actions are methodical, as smooth and unhesitating as one ties a shoe. With strength, with utmost precision he lifts her and slams her onto the stag head, and the screams of agony that rip through her invigorate him, embolden him. As she flails and tries to free herself, a knife is produced and the clean, forced line down her chest is one of time, of practice and strength. Her screams turn to whimpers, to gasping chokes as her brain struggles to comprehend what is happening –

            -Will needs no such effort, though; he knows exactly what he is doing as he does it.

            The lungs are removed, and along his hands he sees gloves and an odd, vinyl suit over a nondescript black top. With finesse, he removes them and stares down at wide eyes and a gaping mouth, a body struggling to provide what it no longer can.  The contrast of skin to blood, of bone to gore is empowering, and in her final moments of life, as her heart shudders and struggles, Will stares down and imagines just how beautiful the backdrop of the field around them set to the woman impaled on the horns, her purpose nothing more than to provide a contrast to Garrett Jacob Hobbs and a freshly prepared meal.

            _Can’t you see, Agent Graham? This is the sort of thing you have the capacity to be._

He comes to and takes several steps back, grasping for a wet rag that’s provided by someone he can’t see, stuck as he is blinking back the sensation of what lungs feel like in gloved hands, what bones feel like jutting through skin. He lifts his walls in his mind, raises them high, but they fight him for longer than he likes, and he has to use another rag to fully remove all of what he’s consumed through his skin.

            “What’d you see?” Jack asks him. The annotator stands nearby, pen poised over the notepad. Will gasps and inhales sharply, closing his eyes tight for several furious heartbeats.

            “…This is for me,” he murmurs, and his voice is half-strangled.

            “You?”

            “It isn’t Dolarhyde,” he says, and he opens his eyes to look at Jack. “That’s why you called, isn’t it? You thought it was Dolarhyde?”

            “Who is it?”

            “I didn’t see that,” he says, and once his hands are sufficiently clean, he holds the rag out and someone takes it from him, allowing him to put his gloves back on with jerky, curt movements. “Intelligent psychopath, a sadist; not one I’ve seen before. He removed the victim’s lungs while she was alive, after he impaled her on the antlers. He’s either eaten, or he’s going to eat the lungs.”

            “Eat the lungs,” Jack repeats flatly.

            “He sees her as a pig. He sees all of us as pigs, and he wanted to show me that.”

            “Why you?” Jack presses. “Is it another empath? Another rogue?”

            “No, this…this person knows about me. About what happened with Hobbs, I think. Hobbs impaled women on antlers, so he impaled this woman on antlers.” He scrambles to try and think, to focus past the chill down his spine at someone that spoke so vividly to him. “He…asked me if I could see.”

            “He asked you?”

            “He did this with me in mind, Jack. He did this to get at me.”

            “Why?”

            “I don’t know,” Will snaps, and he thinks of the last line before he was able to pull himself away. He should tell Jack what the voice said, dissonant, faraway, but he can’t quite bring himself to. _This is the sort of thing you have the capacity to be._

He doesn’t tell Jack. He doesn’t want Hansen called in. He doesn’t want a therapist, god _forbid_ a review of his mental state if they think he’s getting too close to the edge. He surprised, then, to hear Hannibal Lecter of all people say,

            “Could it be that there is a copycat or a protégé, Agent Crawford? Someone that Agent Hobbs worked with?”

            Will turns his head to look, and the person holding the bloodstained, wet rags is Dr. Lecter of all people, gloved and dressed for the cooler weather.

            “Could be,” Jack admits, and he sighs, pinching the bridge of his nose. “It’s not Dolarhyde? You’re sure?”

            “That’s not Dolarhyde; the tone is different. Dolarhyde seemed purposeful, in control, but this…this was methodical. This was planned, and he was amused the entire time, like it was some kind of punchline to some great big joke.”

            “Are you going to have Agent Graham look into it?” Dr. Lecter asks. Someone nearby reaches for the rags in his hands and disappears with them. Will tracks the movements, studies the flex and twist of Lecter’s wrists as he turns them behind his back casually.

            “Oh, no,” Jack says before Will can speak. “Agent Graham works with RA’s if we can help it. He only gets these guys if we’re in way over our heads.”

            “An intelligent psychopath, particularly a sadist, is very hard to catch,” Will says, and he chances a glance back to her body, splayed out and vulgar in its expression. “You have to wait for them to make a mistake, leave something that an empath can see beyond the thoughts and impressions.”

            “We’ll have a Feeler ghost along the stag head and the surrounding area, see what comes up,” Jack says, and that’s Will’s sign to leave. He’s not _just_ a Feeler, and he won’t have to deal with the case unless they’re in over their heads.

            Instead, he’s got Dolarhyde to keep him busy. He’s not sure which is the better trade-off.

            “Do you have information about his cases?” he asks Jack.

            “Director Purnell told me that she’d e-mail you,” Jack promised. An evasive answer, and Will takes it sullenly.

            Dr. Lecter follows him to his vehicle as he signs out from the crime scene, and they pause near the driver’s door, Will sneaking short, quick glances and the good doctor gazing with steady intent.

            “…Are they going to have you at every single scene I go to?” Will asks warily.

            “For the time being,” he replies lightly.

            “That a sign they don’t have any faith in me?”

            “It’s a sign that they want you to make a healthy, smooth recovery from the trauma you endured,” Lecter says, and at Will’s scoffing, indignant bark of laughter, he continues, “Where there was a stag head involved, they had suspicions it was a tie to Agent Hobbs, and they wanted to ensure you wouldn’t have a flashback of any sort to the previous incident.”

            “I didn’t,” Will snaps.

            “Didn’t you?”

            “No, this was nothing like Hobbs,” he says, waving a hand at Lecter’s amused expression. “Don’t give me that look, this was…Hobbs loved those girls. He wouldn’t disrespect them like this. He wouldn’t be vulgar, cruel. He thought their deaths were quick and merciful, but this guy…this guy was happy to relish in her pain. He knew the cuts to make, the way to turn her at just the right angle that she was impaled rather than falling against the antlers and sliding to the side. He…relished in her screaming.”

            Will is careful to speak slowly, that he can ensure that he says ‘he’ rather than ‘I’.

            “A foil to Agent Hobbs?”

            “A foil to Agent Hobbs,” Will agrees. “And…and a jab at me. Whoever they are, they’re jabbing at me.”

            “Does that make you feel threatened, Agent Graham?” Lecter wonders. In the brilliant sunlight of the crisp fall day, his hair holds golden hues, his skin alive and positively glowing. Will studies his expression, the way that his eyes can only take in what he can see rather than what’s behind the face.

            “…No. If anything, I-” He stops himself before he can say anything stupid, before he can say something he’ll regret. Dr. Lecter tilts his head slightly, prompting.

            “You what, Agent Graham?” he prompts.

            Will swallows, glances back to the scene in the short distance, agents hurrying to and fro, another empath standing off to the side and waiting, their back to the scene. He grimaces, adjusts his glasses that slide down his nose no matter how hard he tries to fix them, and he lets out a short, forlorn sigh.

            “If anything, I’d say they’re trying to play a game with me,” he says at last. To his surprise, Dr. Lecter doesn’t bother to attempt to correct him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for all of the love this has gotten! With 3 of my other fics finished, I am feeling so pumped about this one! :)
> 
> I've never really worked in a present tense, but I felt that it was more fitting for this character/world. That sense that it's discussed now and done now because there's no guarantee of tomorrow. Idk.


	6. Where Terror Roams

Chapter 6:

            The address the Feeler gave him was to a small film developing business towards the outside of town. As a hobby, Agent Dolarhyde –the **RA** , Will tells himself –developed and worked with film in his spare time. He spoke very little to some people, said nothing to most; it isn’t until he’s let into a room whose lights are completely turned off that he finds someone whose willing _and_ able to give him information regarding the RA.

            “Oh, I knew Mr. D. Really swell guy,” the woman says in the quiet hum of technology and the inconsistent and sporadic squeaks of an office chair. “He really knew his stuff about film development. At one point, he was able to capture photos with infrared lenses and got them taken care of here.”

            “Did he have his own office?” Will asks. He likes the quiet of the developing room, the utter darkness around them as she continues to work, regardless of his questions. Her life doesn’t stop just because someone else’s does –film needs developed, processed, and distributed. Reba McClane does it all and more.

            “He worked in here with me, as a matter of fact,” she says. “He did a good job, and I needed a guy like that.”

            “What sort of person was he?”

            At that she doesn’t answer, and he hears the chair squeak in his direction. The darkness makes his skin sensitive to the touch, his ears quick to catch the smallest of sounds. He wonders what his skin would tell him, dare he press it to the work tables Agent Dolarhyde frequented.

            In the darkness he can’t see, but in the darkness he knows he’d be able to feel.

            “What is this?” Reba asks after a prolonged silence. To anyone else, it would have been uncomfortable, but it wasn’t for Will.

            “Miss McClane, I’m Agent Will Graham,” he says. “We are attempting to track Agent Dolarhyde because-”

            “Because he’s an empath, and he went rogue?” she guesses. It’s a good guess, and Will stares in the direction of her voice, mouth puckered at her knowing tone.

            “What do you know?” he asks.

            “Not as much as it sounds like I do,” she admits. “He told me what he did –Mr. D tracked empaths for the FBI and observed them. If they behaved in a way that made it sound like they were going to do something nasty to themselves or someone else, he reported it to his boss, and they took care of the empath.” At Will’s almost stunned silence, she continues, “If his work wasn’t done good enough –if he didn’t _see_ enough –then they eventually went rogue, and that’s when someone like you comes along, right?”

            “…Right.”

            The fact that she’s aware of his job at the FBI floors Will, and he clings to that knowledge because it’s a start, and it’s a really, _really_ good start.

            “So when he started acting a bit funny and a bit cross, I asked him.” Her voice shifts, and there is a sound of something blunt, tapered, dragging and tapping along the floor. “He says, maybe he doesn’t do his job as well, and maybe they wonder what he’s good for? If someone like you always comes along, is there someone like him _watching_ someone like him?”

            Will twitches, nodding along at that train of thought. It’s not far-fetched, and if Dolarhyde’s mind is truly shifting and falling in on itself, it’s a perfectly logical worry. “Did he give you anything more than that?”

            “He said that he was losing time,” she says, and it’s mournful. He can taste the pain in the air. “He said he felt that time was slipping out of his hands.”

            That in of itself is another handhold, and he grabs onto it, taking a step forward. His shoe brushes the thing that had tapped and slid across the floor to him, and both of them freeze, close enough that he can smell her hand lotion –Freesia and Lavender.

            “…May I touch your hands?” he asks quietly.

            “Are you tired of being blind?” she asks, and something about it seems funny to her.

            “I want to help him,” he replies, and it seems to reverberate in the room. Help. Help like he helped Hobbs, only he helped Hobbs by killing him. Help like he helped Abigail, only she was sleeping so deep they didn’t know when she’d wake.

            “You can touch my hands, Agent Graham,” she says, and there is a fumbling of cloth, of shifting and adjusting before she holds them out to him. “I don’t know if you’ll really find what you’re looking for, though.”

            He removes his gloves and tucks them away, patting at the darkness before him helplessly before he finds her hands, and without preparation he’s falling in, tumbling over and over and over as before he was blind and now can _see._

            _My head presses to the tiger, feels its deep breaths as its chest lifts, then compresses, lifts then compresses. Fingers tight, taut in the fur, holding onto a power that radiates from nose to tail, an elegance as it lays sprawled, vulnerable but safe. Fingers glide, feel along the ribs, then the spine._

_Gentle, hushed whispers of excitement as teeth the size of the index finger are caressed, and there is a gasp to the left, a breath of air that draws in taut then holds. They are as awed as I am, as gentle as I am –_

_-They do not guide with hands touching, assuming, but rather let my own feet step with my own life and my own knowledge. They do not coddle but lift, support, allow my breath to be my own. Hands that make touch a form of delicacy, expression of admiration rather than supposition of my failings; hands that know the shape of my lips by tracing, that know the curve of my hip only after asking –_

_-Hands that hold, hands that shift and love, hands that say goodbye. I stand but cannot see, hear but cannot speak because he is gone, and the absence in the room after is enough that I wish to prick it with a needle, let the air out slow enough to burn –_

_-Brick walls my hands glide across, known from habit, known from memory. I hum, tuneless, and there is the smell of ricotta in the air from the restaurant down the street. He took me there, once, when he first had the boldness to ask me. We were happy. We were happy._

Will lets go of her hands and quickly gloves his, rubbing them against his sides to ingrain his skin into the leather and outside of her head, her past. He swallows so hard that it hurts, and if he had enough voice, he’d have asked for water. He doesn’t, though; he stands still in the silence that tastes how heartbreak feels, and he knows Reba McClane far better than anyone else in the entire world.

            Anyone else, that is, except for Dolarhyde.

            “He didn’t register the two of you in a relationship,” he says quietly. His voice is almost drowned out by the humming of the equipment.

            “I didn’t want him to,” she replies. “He told me about that work rule, and I said that I didn’t care what the FBI wanted me to do. They may keep track of empaths, but they have no business keeping track of me.”

            “Why show me now, then?”

            She’s quiet at that, and Will finds the silence and the darkness as stifling as it is freeing. He admires that she doesn’t hesitate to put him at her level, to make him have to reach out in order to _know_. She’s quick, she’s clever, and if the way she fearlessly put her face beside a tiger’s fangs is any indication, Will knows exactly why Dolarhyde loves her.

            “Because I believe you when you say that you want to help,” she says at last.

            “I do,” Will affirms.

            “He’s mentioned you enough times that when they said it was you wanting to come and speak to me, I thought that I’d better listen.”

            He doesn’t say anything to that because he doesn’t want to give anything away. He’s floored by it, though, floored by the thought of Dolarhyde knowing him enough to speak about him –speaking about him often enough for her to recognize him. He makes a hasty escape after passing his card to her in the dark, and the light outside in the hallway blinds him, so much so that he has to stand and blink stupidly at the wall across from him for a while before he can leave.

            _Maybe he doesn’t do his job as well, and maybe they wonder what he’s good for?_

_Is there someone like him watching someone like him?_

            As he makes his way outside and drives back towards HQ, he wonders something very much the same about himself.

-

            Alana and Dr. Lecter are waiting for him when he gets there, and he takes his time getting out of the car in order to mentally prepare himself. With two of them waiting, there’s something happening, and it’s enough of a happening that even a quick glance to Alana’s face tells him.

            “Abigail Hobbs has woken up?” he asks without truly needing to ask. Alana’s mouth purses at him not waiting to be told, and she glances to Hannibal. Will glances, too, although he gets as much information from it as Alana does –that is to say, not much at all.

            “She has,” Alana says gently. “Have you had lunch yet?”

            “I haven’t,” Will replies. “I’ll go get my case files.”

            “Let’s get lunch.”

            “I want to get my case files,” he says, and he makes a move to go around her. He likes to pretend that he needs the case files to know Abigail Hobbs; that he needs to read ink on paper to understand everything that’s happened to her. He doesn’t, though; as much as he knows himself, he knows Abigail Hobbs, and he thinks that the case files will protect him from the onslaught of looking into the eyes of a girl whose father he murdered –a man that almost killed the both of them in one fell swoop.

            “Will,” Alana starts, and she reaches out to touch his jacket, briefly. Her hands are also gloved, although it’s against the chill of the air rather than to protect herself.

            He pauses to look down at her fingers, and she retracts them guiltily. Even through layers of cloth, he has no desire to be touched.

            “Agent Crawford wishes to ask her a few questions and needs you present to ascertain her honesty,” Dr. Lecter says, and Will looks from Alana’s gloves to Lecter’s face.

            “What?”

            “He has suspicions that she may have helped her father at some point. Those girls all attended the schools she’d taken tours of for university, and he just needs to know whether or not she was an accessory,” Alana says. Their playing off of one another is surely scripted, and it makes his lip curl.

            “An _accessory_?” Will scoffs. “She was almost murdered by Agent Hobbs, and you think she was an _accessory_ to his crimes?”

            “It’s possible,” Lecter says congenially. “Although, it’s entirely possible that she wasn’t.”

            “That’s why he’s requesting you. You were far enough involved with the RA that you’ll be able to tell his mark on his daughter,” Alana adds.

            “With two psychiatrists and an E-3 empath, we’ll surely be able to figure it out,” Lecter adds. Will looks to him in time to see a small, fleeting smile, and it’s not lost on him that there’s a tinge of sarcasm laced in his words. It makes the entire thing less of an insult, to see that sort of humor; like the good doctor is just as disgusted, just as affronted at the thought that it’d take all three of them to piece something like that together.

            “You’re there to ensure I don’t have a relapse when I look at her, and Dr. Bloom is there to make sure I’m impartial,” he says to him, turning back around to head towards his car. “If it makes you feel better, Dr. Lecter, it’s not _your_ opinion Jack is uncertain of.”

            Alana doesn’t correct him because she’s the honest sort that won’t lie when he’s hit the mark. They drive to the hospital in silence, save for the light, mildly static-sounding notes of the classic rock station gracing them with a guitar solo. When they get there, he realizes that he’s forgotten his case notes, and he sits in the car for several moments, debating the pros and cons of going back to get it.

            “If it’s too much, today,” Alana begins.

            That decides it for him. He gets out and heads into the hospital.

            The place smells like funeral flowers and salt from tears. He basks in the sensation of a thousand hearts all at different intervals –some slow, staggered, others racing and terrified –and he makes his way towards her room, nodding to two nuerotypical agents waiting just by the doors. He averts his gaze, and they do, too.

            Inside of the room, there are a few cards on a stand and a few vases. The girl sitting up in bed doesn’t seem interested in them, though. Nervous hands pluck at a blanket while a nurse bustles about, taking notes on her clipboard, and at the sound of their footsteps she looks up with glassy, distant eyes.

            Without prompt, he finds himself tumbling inside of them.

            “Hello, Abigail,” Alana says in greeting when Will doesn’t speak. He can’t speak, distracted as he is by the way her skin feels like his own, the way her eyes reflect his own to show him his demons inside. His neck hurts, _aches_ from its abuse, and he wonders when it’s alright to ask for pain medicine again. Why, _why_ now –why now? Grief and hunger alike sitting perched on the tip of their tongue, and is it too much to ask for a sip of water without someone checking my temperature?

            “Hello,” Abigail says, and Will mouths the words with her, knows them like they were his own design. They are, though, aren’t they? He feels uncertain, scared, and at the scent of a secret, walls suddenly rise up, fast and furious as he’s slammed back into his own consciousness where he is himself again and distinctly not Abigail Hobbs.

            “My name is Alana Bloom, this is Dr. Hannibal Lecter, and that is-”

            “I know you,” Abigail interrupts, staring at Will. He pins his gaze to her neck, where the gauze is neatly pressed to hide the abuse underneath. “You killed my father.”

            He checks the pulse at his wrist, to time the heartbeats and reassure himself that he’s Will Graham. “Yes,” he manages from hoarse lips.

            “He was going to harm you,” Dr. Lecter says when Will adds nothing else. “Therefore, Agent Graham felt it best to help.”

            “He was going to kill me, you mean,” she corrects slowly. She tries to sound brave, but the tone is all wrong.

            “Yes,” Will finds himself repeating.

            “He killed my mother,” she tacks on. Will doesn’t find it important to agree; she saw it, saw the entire thing as her world quite suddenly tipped over and fell down, sundered by hands that held too tight and didn’t know how to let her go. He nods, and she looks down to her busy hands tugging at loose threads.

            “Agent Graham is an empath that works for the FBI, like your father did, Abigail,” Alana says when no one else speaks. Her voice is gentle, kind. “I consult with the FBI on occasion, but my specialty lies in childhood trauma and family counseling. Dr. Lecter works with a myriad of patients with special disorders or traumas, and Agent Graham-”

            “-hunts rogue empaths,” Abigail interrupts again. Her lip tremors despite how blasé she’s attempting to sound, and there is an odd twist to her expression as she blanches and looks down again. “He knew you were looking for him.”

            “Did he?” Will asks without having to.

            “Oh, yes,” she says distantly. If she has her way, Will figures she can shred the blanket to pieces before the day is through. “He told me, ‘I left work to see you graduate, but they won’t like it. They’re going to send Agent Graham after me, and if he finds me then he’s going to take me away from you.’”

            “I’m sorry, Abigail,” he says.

            “He said that you were the only known E-3 not in an institution.”

            “I am,” he agrees.

            “He didn’t stay at the house, you know. I don’t know where he stayed, but he’d just…show up sometimes, drop in. Is that what you’re here for? You want to know about him? You need to question me?” She looks back up at that, although she won’t meet his gaze. There is something in the action, though, something that makes Will step forward and sit down in the chair near the bed without invitation. Abigail tracks the moment without looking at his face.

            “Only if you’re comfortable discussing it,” Alana says lightly. “If you aren’t comfortable with that right now, that’s okay, too. First and foremost, we just wanted to see how you were doing.”

            It’s a pretty bad lie, and Will wonders if Abigail can sense that. Why bring three of them to her room –two psychiatrists and the man that hunted her father –if it was a courtesy call? His lip twitches, and he rests his palms on his knees.

            “No, I’m…okay. I know they’re all dead. The nurses wouldn’t tell me anything, so I said I couldn’t remember, but I know they’re all dead and I’m the only one left. If I don’t say something, someone else will, right? They’ll say it for me, even if it’s not the truth?”

            “That is an unfortunate potential in cases like this,” Hannibal says. He sits down on the chair at the end of the bed, but Will doesn’t quite react to it, not like he reacts to the way her mouth seems to move whether she realizes it or not, twisting and curling in on something that he thinks is a secret.

            _Look at me_ , he thinks, coaxing. _Look at me and show me._

He doesn’t think Abigail Hobbs can read minds, but she can feel his eyes on her. A tremor works its way down her spine, and she looks over at him, a brief flick of her gaze.

            That’s all he needs.

            He’s falling in on himself, but he’s not himself anymore; he never was and never will be again. Twisting, hurtling, and when he slams to the concrete ground of a university campus, the wind is knocked out of him.

            No, no; not him, _her_.

            “Oh my god, are you alright?” a girl asks, and she’s helping me, helping me stand, helping me brush gravel from jeans faded in only the most fashionable of ways. There’s a rip on the side that was made intentionally, before I ever even owned them, and the girl admires the wash for a moment before she smiles and meets my gaze.

            I don’t meet _her_ gaze, though. I’m not stupid. My dad raised me better than that.

            “Just a stumble,” I say, and it’s as smooth and rehearsed as it’s always been. That’s what this is, though, isn’t it? A script? A play? A scene where I play the smallest but most important part? Over her shoulder, I spy him sitting at a bench, watching us over a magazine of _Guns and Ammo_. It’s discreet. It’s perfect.

            Bile rises in the back of my throat, and I swallow it.

            “Jeez, that was a bad stumble! Are you new here? There’s a lot of kids on campus, but I recognize most faces.”

            “I’m touring the campus for next Fall semester,” I say, and I roll my eyes good-naturedly. “I thought it was early, but my dad said it’s best to get an early start.”

            “He’s right, though! See as many as you can, travel around as much, really find your place, you know?”

            “I know,” I try to reassure her.

            “My name’s Denise.”

            “Abigail.”

            “Good to meet you! Have you found your tour group yet?” I shake my head, and she nods, ponytail bouncing. “Let me show you where they’re at, ‘kay? This place is easy to get turned around at.”

            “Thanks,” I say with such sincerity that it makes her beam. It’s then, as we walk side by side and chat about studies, that I glance to the side and meet her eyes.

            I don’t fall in –my dad taught me better than that.

            Instead, I see the facts, listed along the iris, like bits of data I extract and place to the side for later. I see age, birthday, insecurities of weight, address, family, and pets. I see heartbreaks, crushes, friends, enemies, and a professor that won’t let up.

            The most crucial, relieving part of the entire experience is that I don’t even have to remember it all. I just have to store it within my mind, so that he can peer within the walls that protect me and extract it for himself later.

            Otherwise, I’ll be honored the way the rest of them were.

            _He’s gone; he can’t hurt you, he can’t hurt you. I’m safe, but why do they stare? Why is she staring so intently? I can’t look at them all, can’t see them, otherwise he’ll know, he’ll know, he’ll **know**..._

Will Graham comes back into his own skin with a startling clarity. The membrane against his sinew, blood, and bone is thin, and he wonders just how hard he’d have to push to tear it. Could he peel it back, layer by layer, see each painstaking centimeter and know it for what it was?

            At this moment, he is very aware of the wall between Abigail Hobbs and Will Graham. He is very much aware because he knows that she consciously put it there.

            She’s an empath.

            “Agent Graham?” Alana’s voice pulls him from the intent stare that he’s fixated upon Abigail. Time and enough experience have given him the tools to school his face, and it’s with a calm, resigned expression that he looks to Alana and Hannibal. There is no shock. There is no surprise. There is no fear.

            Abigail Hobbs, though, positively reeks with it.

            “She’s not lying,” he says slowly. It eases from him, smooth and sure with a hint of an old, Southern accent. It’s a tell, in truth, but not one that they’d pick up on easily.

            He’s not quite sure the discussion they had while he tried to delve into the recesses of her mind, but his statement is met with a nod from Alana and the briefest of lip twitches from Dr. Lecter. He looks from them to Abigail, and the expression she gives him is one of such utmost relief and terror that he thinks he’ll suffocate on it if he’s not careful.

            “Would you like to go for a walk, Abigail?” he offers.

            Just like that, her expression shutters as she tries to gauge his reasoning. Guarded. Wary.

            “I’ll ask a nurse if they’ll allow it,” Alana says, and she walks out of the room after giving Hannibal a pointed look.

            Hannibal Lecter, for all intents and purposes, seems to be on a similar wavelength. He stands, adjusts his suitcoat, and murmurs something about refreshment just down the hall. The look he gives Will as he steps out is something that reeks of a mild case of recklessness, and he runs with it, grabs it and shakes it like a rabbit caught in his maw.

            He turns to Abigail the moment that the door closes, tense. “You’re a Seer.”

            “You can’t tell them,” Abigail pleads. Without Alana and Lecter watching, the taut turn of her shoulders caves, leaves her looking well and truly fragile. “You can’t.”

            “We have, at best, forty seconds before Dr. Bloom returns, one hundred and twenty before Dr. Lecter does, Abigail Hobbs,” he says. “Why did your father hide you?”

            “He said they’d do to me what they did to him,” she whispers.

            “What’d they do?” Will presses. He leans in with it, resists the urge to take hold of her. The wall between them is too thick, too pronounced, and he wonders just how long she’s practiced keeping herself hidden from people like him.

            “They took him to the EA, made him think he was only useful with the FBI,” she replies. “Made him think he was only useful when he helped the law.”

            “He made you useful,” Will says pointedly.

            “If I didn’t, he’d have killed me, too.”

            “Either way, you were used.”

            “Are you going to tell them?” she asks, and before he can react, before he can even think what his next step will be, she’s grabbing him by the forearm, hauling him just close enough to press their foreheads together. “Please, _please_ don’t tell them.”

            He finds himself falling in again.

            _“You don’t have to do this, dad, please,” I beg, but the words fall useless, useless like mom’s body as it lays on the kitchen floor, useless like the dead leaves we churn through as he drags me along._

_“Shh, sh,” he soothes, the sound he used to make near horses._

_My heart pounds; with each beat, it tells me that this is how I die. This, in all of its horror and terror and fear, is how I die._

_I did what was asked, but in the end we all return to dust. In the end, we are all food for the things that crawl beneath the earth._

_He is in the cabin, but the angle is wrong, twisted. He does not face Abigail and her father, poised with a knife. Will Graham instead sees himself, but not as one would see a mirror; he is different, feral, and wild. He is a stranger, and the gun he levels at them is lethal._

_“P-please,” Will hears himself say, but he’s not Will Graham. He’s Abigail, and they are in dire need of help. Everything has gone wrong, all wrong._

_The knife bites, claws into them, and they feel it with the force of memory, of betrayal. Loud, repetitive pops litter the air, and the sensation of hitting the floor is lost in the wake of an ocean of pain that sweeps over them, staggering._

_He appears in their fading vision, although this time he is terrified, terrified as bare hands press to skin, and they feel it as they connect to this man whose pupils encase the entire iris, a singular entity that exists as a whole, where there is no end or beginning. His cries of terror, of pain mask theirs, leave them spiraling down, down, down where there is a sort of darkness in giving in, a sort of pleasure in giving up. He will take the trials of the living and leave them to return to dust._

The barrier is put in place between them once more; he can feel it slide between them, a partition between their minds that she can put there with little thought. He jerks from her hold and stares at her red-rimmed eyes, her bandage newly clean and freshly applied, and he’s only barely aware of the shuddering breaths that rip from his colorless lips.

            “If you tell them, you’ll kill us,” she insists, and Will finds himself nodding along with her because they are one in the same, Will and Abigail, two halves of a singular whole. “They can’t know or else we’ll die. You feel it, don’t you? When you touched my skin that day, we became one?”

            “We’ll die,” Will agrees, and he presses his fingertips to his eyelids, knocking his glasses askew.

            “Please help us, Agent Graham. You’re the only one that can keep both you and me safe.”

            And Will Graham agrees, mouth pressed tight as he revisits that scene, feels the blade parting his skin, only this time he’s staring up into his own eyes wide with horror, and he’s begging him to save them both.

            “Don’t worry, Abigail. I’ll keep us safe.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for all of your support! I can never say it enough. You guys are great! Check out a few announcements on the tumblr for some exciting things happening within a day or so! :D


	7. Where Hearts Go to Quiet

Chapter 7:

            He sits by the river, fishing pole in one hand and a flask in the other. As he fishes, he finds himself revisiting the same scene over and over and over again in his head, and it’s enough of an imposition that he is more than lucky that he brought two flasks instead of one –god almighty, why hadn’t he brought the entire fifth to the river? Why had he left so much behind?

            Alana was going to be _so_ upset with him when she finally got him to answer the phone.

            In truth, he could have handled his departure from the hospital far better than he did. He didn’t _have_ to stand so fast he toppled his chair over, and he certainly hadn’t meant to barrel from the room so quickly he knocked a nurse into Hannibal. At least Hannibal had been able to catch her before she fell into a surprised and concerned Alana. The water hadn’t been saved, though, but he’s certain no one gave a second thought to the water dropping and splattering everywhere. No matter the protests tossed his way, furious heels on tile close behind him, he found himself all but running from the hospital, hailing the first taxi by stepping directly in front of it so that it had no choice but to stop for him.

            All in all, a rather dramatic getaway. If he was in control of himself, he’d have left with far better finesse, enough that no one asked questions, enough that when he returned to work he wouldn’t have to deal with Jack.

            He takes another pull from the flask, contemplating the fact that he wasn’t in control of himself then, and he certainly isn’t in control now. He hopes no one tells Jack.

            When the fish tugs on the line, he hauls it up with slow, careful turns of the reel, setting the flask down to give it his full attention. Sometimes, when nights are too quiet and dreams are too far, he finds himself thinking of his childhood, of the way he’d cried when his father once killed a fish in front of him. He doesn’t have many memories of his childhood, seeing as how his empathy was an early discovery. The memories he has locked away within the stream of consciousness in his mind sometimes blur the way old photos do, discolored and lacking details. Other times, though, they slide along the water with sharp clarity, so much so that it startles him with how each color fights against the other for attention, clear and bold and so utterly painful with the way he can only see the whole thing if he stands far enough away from it.

            His father hit the fish on a rock, and nerves kept it moving for many minutes after. He threw up later, thinking about it, the scales in the sunlight and the eyes that didn’t close. He was glad he hadn’t touched the fish, otherwise he’d have felt its death –luck, he told himself, after he knew what it was to be an empath, to feel the world within your skin. It was luck that day that kept him from feeling the sensation of death at only four-years-old.

            Now, he hauls the fish up with gloved hands and unhooks it, holding its curving and twisting body firmly before he sets it back down into the water and allows it to swim away. He sets the fishing pole aside and takes another swig from his flask, feeling the alcohol burn all the way down to warm his stomach.

            Will Graham has a problem.

            By law, empaths have to report to the EA. Each and every empath in the United States are registered, trained to handle their gift so that they can be useful members of society. In the eyes of the law, Will is committing a felony by not reporting Abigail, but anytime he considers picking up the phone, a dose of fear rushes through his veins and makes him freeze, so much so that he is more than sure he’s having a low-grade anxiety attack.

            He can’t report Abigail. He has to keep them safe.

            Safe from who, though? Her father is dead. Will Graham shot him.

            It was a brilliant plan on Hobbs’ part, if Will is being particularly honest with himself. As he catches and releases several more fish, muscles loosening their taut hold the more he drinks, he admits to himself that Agent Hobbs was clever, hiding his daughter from the FBI and the EA. She was his treasure, the line of empathy following through his blood to hers, and he protected it by using himself as a shield and complying wholeheartedly with the FBI. Until he began killing those other girls, no one suspected that he would lie to the FBI. No one suspected he would use his daughter to hunt innocent people.

            Will knows now, though. By keeping quiet he is, in his own right, an accomplice.

            He can’t turn on her, though. As he packs his things away hours later and heads back to his house to make supper, he makes another admission to himself, one that acknowledges how cleverly she turned his gifts on himself. He’d never seen a Seer use their power as a weapon quite like that, using their eyes and their skin to _make_ him see –each time he thinks of her, there is a small part of him that thinks of himself. In her moment of fear, she made him touch her skin and become part of her whole, a world in which if he turned on her, he turned on himself, too. A world in which if she died, he died, too.

            Hobbs, despite dying in the end, still somehow won. As long as Abigail remains a secret, there is a singular victory that he can be awarded, that he trained his daughter to be a hunter rather than a tool to be discarded when the FBI lost interest. Will can respect that, even as he fears just what it means for him should they ever find out.

-

            He’s hungover the next morning as he goes to his small office at the FBI, and it sits perched on the tip of his tongue, sour. Every time he exhales, his tongue curls at the taste of day old whiskey. He sips scalding coffee to chase it away, and he fires up his computer to check e-mails. Director Purnell is supposed to reach out to him about Dolarhyde’s work, so that he can plan the next step to hunt down Dolarhyde.

            “Alana called Jack,” Beverly says by way of greeting. She hovers near the door, waiting for an invitation to come in.

            Will grunts, typing his password. It wasn’t until later that he’d realized his glasses had fallen in his haste to escape the hospital, and he laments it now, missing the barrier between his eyes and the world. As the desktop boots up, he leans back in his chair and sighs.

            “How angry is he?”

            “Not any angrier than usual.” She snorted at her own private joke. “He’s in a meeting, but he wants to talk to you afterwards.”

            “What kind of trouble am I in?” he asks, looking over to her.

            She finds his question odd, and he notes her wrinkled nose and head tilt as she adjusts herself. “None. He just wants more information about Hobbs.”

            None. She’s not lying –even without his gifts, he’d know that. Beverly Katz is an honest person, from her quirky sense of self to her sharp observations at a crime scene. For a neurotypical, he’s comfortable around her –as comfortable as he can be around people for extended periods of time.

            She’s waiting for him to explain why he thinks he’s in trouble. He doesn’t want that conversation with anyone, though, so when the desktop finally loads, he clicks impatiently on the e-mail icon, taking a long gulp from his coffee cup.

            “Not a day for conversations?” she questions. Where others would wander away, disquieted by him, Beverly holds her ground. Will sighs and sets his coffee cup down.

            “I’m hungover,” he says curtly. Beverly’s grin is wide, her amusement palpable against his skin.

            “That kind of night?”

            “The Hobbs girl woke up,” he explains. At her nod, he continues irritably, “And hospitals are no good for me.”

            “Drinking alone?”

            “Is that a question?”

            She nods in agreement and ducks her head. “Not like you’d want the company, but drinking alone is a sign of alcoholism.”

            Her concern isn’t just kindness. Alcoholism is a big no-no in the EBAU for empaths, right alongside rules against serial killing and keeping empaths a secret. Will nods in agreement and scratches his stubble, casting her an appreciative look.

            “I’ll call someone next time,” he promises.

            “It’s not alcoholism if it’s social,” she quips. At Will’s wry, waxen grin, she continues, “I just wanted to get back to you on Dolarhyde. They looked into the background of the victims, but nothing really jumps out. Mr. Perkins worked with pharmaceuticals, and his wife took care of the house and finances.”

            “Pharmaceuticals?”

            “Yeah, he does a lot of work with psychiatrists, too. A lot of research facilities, testing, and distributing of anti-psychotics.” She flips through a folder and sets a sheet on top, eyeing it. “I’ll get copies of the file for you to look over. Maybe Dolarhyde got some bad medicine and lashed out?”

            “Was he on any medication at the time?” Will asks. The thought feels like a thread he wishes to tug at and turn over in his hands.

            “I’ll double check his file, but I don’t recall seeing anything. I mean, like I said before, Dolarhyde was a pretty calm guy. I wouldn’t have expected him to go rogue.”

            “It’s not always easy to pinpoint a potential RA,” Will says. It’s not so much to comfort her than it is to comfort himself.

            “Hobbs was almost obvious. They just didn’t expect him to…” Her voice trails off, and she clears her throat.

            “Kill eight girls, his wife, and attempt to kill his daughter?” Will supplies when she doesn’t finish.

            “They don’t always kill,” she adds with a shrug.

            “Dolarhyde does.”

            “Well, we set you on the case and you always find them.” She smiles to reassure him. “So far, you’ve always found them.”

Pleased, having said what she wanted, she sees herself out and closes the door for him so that he doesn’t have to get up.

            More than a little relieved that whatever Alana said to Jack, it’s not damning, he opens one of the unread messages once he sees the subject line.

**To: Agent Will Graham, EBAU, E-3**

**From: Director Kade Purnell, EI**

**Subject: Francis Dolarhyde**

**Director Crawford informed me of your interest in the RA, Francis Dolarhyde, and his investigations before the regrettable circumstances that occurred. It is my regret to inform you that his work was classified with a clearance A-1 level necessary in order to access the files. Clearance that you do not have, Agent Graham. I will not give leave for you to obtain it.**

**I can assure you that the lack of knowledge of his work before becoming classed as an RA will not impede your current investigation regarding him. Continue to track his whereabouts so that he may receive the necessary treatment of an E-2 RA.**

**-Kade Purnell, Direct. EI**

            Will reads the e-mail once. As he glares at the page, it’s not necessary to read a second time because the words feel imprinted on his eyes, ingrained in his skin.

            _I will not give leave for you to obtain it?_

He finishes reading and responding to other e-mails less volatile than that one, and he forces himself to finish his coffee before he goes to find Jack, steps pressing down harshly on the thin carpet of the EBAU halls.

            He strolls into his office without knocking, and Jack is surprised as he holds a phone to his ear. His gaze cuts sharp lines along Will’s person, and whenever the speaker on the other line goes quiet, he lets out a quiet hum of affirmation. Will resists the urge to pace before him.

            “I’ll see what I can do.” A pause as he listens. “Yes, that’s fine…and I’m sorry, Agent Harris, but I’m going to have to call you back.”

            He hangs up, and Will wastes no time with posturing. “Director Purnell won’t give me the clearance.”

            “It’s clearly information you don’t need to know to do your job, Will,” Jack replies wearily. He’s been waiting for Will to come to him, and Will can see it in the way he rolls his shoulders back to prepare for a lengthy discussion.

            “Whatever it was that he was investigating, _that_ is what set him off,” Will fires back. “If I know what it is, what made him feel so betrayed, I can see where he’d go next, what he’d do!”

            “Whatever it is, it’s sensitive information that she’s not willing to share.” A pause. “Or she can’t share.”

            “It’s bull shit, Jack! I need to know what he was working on!”

            “That’s not your call!” Jack snaps in return. Whatever hesitations that Will had been able to pick at before are gone, and Jack’s steel spine somehow manages to stiffen even more. “You’re an E-3, but that doesn’t give you special privileges!”

            That stops Will, and he stares at Jack, hands gripping his hips so hard he hopes the skin bruises, turns the color of old banana peels. The anger he so easily displayed, so easily shared isn’t so much dissipating as it’s curling in on itself, breaking down something more usable because clearly showing it isn’t fixing the problem. If anything, it’s making Jack rise to the challenge.

            “…I didn’t realize you though that I was granted special privileges,” he replies instead, coldly.

            “Will-”

            “What kind of privileges do you think I’m granted, Jack?” he asks, gritting his teeth. He’s aware that it’s more of a snarl than a smile, but he tries. “What sort of benefits do you think that I, as an empath, get to enjoy that you don’t?”

            “Don’t,” Jack warns him, and Will snorts.

            “Come on, Jack,” he chides. “Last I checked, you didn’t have to register with the FBI when you were a child for being born a certain way. You didn’t have to register Bella when you started dating her.”

            “I don’t get to skip out on work because of a little stress either,” Jack returns with equal grittiness.

            Was _that_ how Alana worded it? Will stalks closer and leans over the desk so that he can get close to Jack, get close enough to make him nervous. He doesn’t look into his eyes, though. Jack is a man hounded by memories he can’t escape, and they’re so far into the front of his mind that Will finds himself falling into the same one every time he looks at him. It’s Jack’s only defense against empaths, and it’s a damn good one.

            What he can see, though, is the conversations that must have occurred in this very room without him, mentions of his psyche and his behaviors. Kade Purnell sitting with a sharp pencil skirt and a well-fitted blazer on one side of the desk, calmly putting Jack in his place as she denies him his request.

            When Will thinks that, though, he stops. He looks along the desk, inhales a certain sort of dreadful comradery. He can imagine the relief, the ability to place the blame off of himself and onto someone else. A sort of relief that smells like cough medicine and stale trail mix, and Will glides his gloved hands along the surface of the desk –if anything, to remind Jack that all he has to do to take off his gloves to feel the truth in the whorls and curves of the wood.

            No, Will may not want to look in his eyes to read his thoughts, but he can dream up the realities that happened when he wasn’t in the room. His gifts give him that.

            “I’ll keep looking for him,” he says at last, and his eyes fasten to Jack’s hands sitting curled to fists at his desk. “I’ll do my job, even if you’re inclined to hobble me to do it.”

            “Thank you,” Jack says, not sounding at all thankful. “That’s all we ask you to do here, Will.”

            “Abigail Hobbs is innocent, too,” he tosses in, heading towards the door. “I’m sure Dr. Bloom told you, but as your certified lie detector test, I can promise you the same. Traumatized, scared, and indignant that we’d even ask, but honest.”

            And maybe it’s because he knows Jack is lying to him, but he doesn’t feel all that guilty about lying in return. Whatever Agent Dolarhyde was investigating before he snapped, it must have been serious –enough for Kade Purnell to e-mail Will to shut him up. Enough for Jack Crawford to lie to him. Enough for Dolarhyde to lose some part of himself while looking in the mirrors stuck to the eyes of another.

            Will would keep Abigail safe. He’d keep himself safe. He’d find another way to find Francis Dolarhyde, too.

-

            As he’s walking to his car to go and see Reba McClane, something in the air sets him off. He isn’t sure if it’s the smell on the wind, or if it’s the way the back of his shirt presses too tight to his skin, but he pauses by his car door, tensing. There are many things about an empath that biologically are used to connect to people, this he knows. It has been his struggle since he was able to recall the way his father’s simple hug made his skin feel as though it were ripping in two.

            There are other things, though, things still being studied within labs and universities, among talk show hosts and scientists about empaths. As much as they struggle to connect, to broach that space between them and another, there is another aspect to their abilities, something that grants them an immense sense of _knowing_ things that no one else could possibly know, things that make it impossible to connect because who wants to spend their time around a person that knows about any number of unknowable things?

            For example, things like the feeling of being watched.

            He looks about himself discreetly, but nothing immediately stands out. His keys fumble with the lock, and he slowly opens his car door, swallowing so hard it almost hurts, his heartbeat stuttering before beginning again. He’d heard neurotypicals call it paranoia, the way the hair on the back of their neck would stand up. He’d also read contradictory accounts from survivors of serial killers whose ‘paranoia’ saved their life when it came down to brass tacks.

            Being an E-3 empath, he was privy to enough tangible emotion floating along the breeze to know that it wasn’t paranoia. He was most certainly being watched.

            It wasn’t by another empath, though. If it was, he wouldn’t necessarily be able to sense it. Empaths trained to observe and investigate knew how to dampen their person, soften their existence within the world so that another empath couldn’t see. Much like Abigail Hobbs could draw barriers that held even Will back, any other trained empath could do something similar.

            A neurotypical, then.

            As he drives away, he thinks of Dolarhyde’s words to Reba, shared within the walls of the place he most liked to work, out of the gaze of the FBI:

            _Is there someone like me watching someone like me?_

-

            Unable to shake the feeling of being watched, he doesn’t go to Reba. He respects her desire for the FBI to be unaware of her relationship, and he doesn’t want eyes where they don’t belong. Instead, he finds himself sitting outside of the coffee shop he went to with Dr. Lecter, and he peruses the articles he’s posted once more, a decimated bagel in one hand and Beverly’s tablet in the other.

            _Evolution of Social Exclusion through Empaths._

Hannibal Lecter talks about empaths a lot for someone that isn’t an empath. He speaks as though they are their own species of person, all the while with the tone of someone that views them as equals in every way. As Will rereads his latest work in the journals, he picks at the bagel rather than eats it, and it’s only when his phone rings that he’s startled from such prolific words.

            “Graham.”

            “Agent Graham, it’s Dr. Lecter. I hope I’m not bothering you.”

            He wasn’t. Will wonders at that, that he shouldn’t be bothered by an unprompted phone call, and he sets the tablet down to better focus. He keeps the article up, though.

            “I’m taking a long lunch,” he says. “Isn’t that what was recommended?”

            “A long and early lunch, yes,” Lecter agrees. “Far be it from me to disturb a healthy eating habit, but when you left yesterday, you forgot your glasses at the hospital. I thought to return them to you.”

            Will notices that he doesn’t mention the how and the method in which he left, and he’s eternally grateful for that. He’s not sure if he wants to discuss it –is it safe to tell Lecter about Abigail? Fingertips hover over the top of the article, tapping the screen so it doesn’t go black.

            “Thank you.”

            “Do you have a free moment today?”

            His phone buzzes with a message from Beverly, and he glances at the notification before setting the phone back beside his ear. “I should. Dr. Lecter, in your article regarding the social exclusion of empaths, you mention a forced distance made unconsciously by both empaths and neurotypicals.”

            “You’ve read my work?” He sounds pleased, although Will can’t be entirely sure. His voice is always mildly pleasant in some manner.

            “Yes.” A beat. “Some,” he amends. _All._

            “Early theories supposed empaths first broached that line diving one person from another due to a need to connect. It evolved into the gifts we see today, but first it was a connection.”

            “That connection was ultimately rejected by society, though.”

            “Mankind, as the apex predator, doesn’t enjoy feeling that there are some among them that are far more gifted,” Hannibal agrees. Will throws away the destroyed remains of his bagel and tucks the tablet under his arm, heading back to his car. If Beverly is texting him, he’s needed somewhere.

            “And in response, out of fear of that persecution, empaths created invisible barriers between themselves and everyone else, despite the initial needs for connection that supposedly gave them their gifts in the first place,” Will adds on.

            “An ironic reaction, but yes.” There is a pause as he seems to try gathering his thoughts around Will’s questions. “Should I ask about yesterday?”

            “Should you?”

            “I’d like to.”

            Silence once more. Will chews on the inside of his mouth and climbs into the car, shutting the door behind himself. On impulse, he locks it because despite removing himself from an uncomfortable scene, he most certainly still feels like he’s being watched. Just down the row, an SUV is parked under some shade, and he puts on sunglasses so that he can scrutinize it subtly.

            “I was unprepared,” he says at last. An understatement. “I didn’t handle it very well.”

            Another text buzzes against his ear, and he glances to it. When another one comes in, he puts Lecter on speakerphone so that he can read them, idly buckling his seatbelt.

            “What happened?”

**Where are you?**

**We need you back here in thirty.**

**We got a call in Louisiana. It’s Dolarhyde.**

            “Dr. Lecter, I’m going to have to call you back,” Will says distractedly, and he starts the car. His skin hums from the last message, comes to life at the way the text curls around the RA’s name. It’s Dolarhyde. It’s Dolarhyde.

            “Is everything alright?”

            “Dolarhyde –the RA –is in Lousinana. I’ve got to go.”

            “I can return your glasses at another time, then,” he says lightly, and Will nods distractedly, taking him off speakerphone so that he has both hands on the wheel as he peels out of the parking lot.

            “If you can be at HQ soon, I can get them there,” he says, and as he turns away from the coffee shop, he glances in the rearview mirror in time to see the SUV also pull away and head in his direction.

            “I can do that, Agent Graham.”

            “Bye.” As an afterthought, he tosses in, “Thank you, Dr. Lecter.”

            “It’s my pleasure,” Lecter replies.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you guys so much for all of the support and love this has gotten! You have no idea how much this means :)
> 
> A special thanks to Emily Elm, Matilda, Inky_starlight, Andrea, and duhaunt6 --you're the best! <3


	8. When Words Smart and Pop

Chapter 8:

            In the rush of packing, debriefing, and organizing, Hannibal Lecter shows up with Will’s glasses.

            “Is it bad?” he asks lightly as Will throws a few things together. He always has a duffel bag in his car that gets refreshed every so often for unplanned trips.

            “A young married couple,” he says. At the presentation of his glasses, he gratefully slides them on so that he can focus on the rim of them rather than sneak glances to Lecter out of the corner of his eye. Despite the energy in the air of the EBAU, the doctor is utterly calm, placid in the wake of emotion that runs high and makes Will’s skin tingle. He was careful to ensure no ounce of his skin from the neck down is visible. He doesn’t want to accidentally touch.

            “No children?”

            “Not this time,” Will says, and he pauses thoughtfully. “He’s changed his MO.”

            “Have you been to Louisiana before?”

            He has, but the memories are hazy. A father whose shoulders were tan under the sun, muscles bulging as he fought with the motor of a boat engine in the swamplands. The water was green under the sunlight, and the air smelled like bugs and algae. “A long time ago,” he says, far long after it’s entirely appropriate to reply. He tosses his toothbrush on top and zips the duffel bag shut, turning towards Dr. Lecter with an awkward shift in his step.

            “Most of your memories outside of the FBI must circulate entirely around the Empath Academy,” Hannibal realizes.

            “They do.”

            “Do you have someone to feed your dogs?” he asks, and Will’s taken aback by the question. It’s no secret he has dogs –the dog hair along the bottom of his slacks alone would be enough to point that fact out to someone looking for it –but the question is sudden, abrupt in the buzzing air that says he has to go, he has to go because Dolarhyde struck again and Will Graham needs to see the crime scene fresh.

            “Dr. Bloom normally feeds them,” he says slowly.

            “Dr. Bloom is in Chicago co-lecturing at a university,” Hannibal replies. He doesn’t point out the odd relationship that Will has with the EBAU’s psychiatrist, that she’d feed his dogs for him. “I can do it, if you’d like.”

            Dr. Lecter would feed his dogs, if he liked. Will wants to say yes, yes please, that’d be such a relief because he doesn’t have many people that he can ask to feed his dogs, but he’s not so sure if that’s a good idea, letting him into his house so that he can see just how Will Graham lives away from society.

            Then again, if Will is back in time, he can maybe graze his hands over whatever Lecter touched so that he can learn more – _understand_ more. Without his gloves, maybe he’d gain an impression of the mind behind the impenetrable façade?

            “…I don’t know if that’d be professional,” he says, and he forces himself sound regretful saying it. “If you’re my psychiatrist, and I’m working…” He busies himself with zipping up the duffle bag rather than look to Lecter.

            “Far be it from me to cross a professional barrier, but I am offering. You’re not asking.”

            “It’d be a personal favor, though.”

            “God forbid we become too friendly because I fed your dogs,” Hannibal says with a smile.

            Despite the stress of all that’s happened, Will stops long enough to smile back.

            “I don’t have many people to feed my dogs,” he admits. It’s probably obvious, since he uses an FBI psychiatrist to feed his dogs, but he says it anyway. An admission without feeling entirely too vulnerable.

            Better that than admit to the good doctor that he’s intentionally harboring a Seer right beneath their noses.

            “I would encourage you to take the steps that would make lasting friendships outside of work, but we can discuss that another time, when you’re not busy.” Lecter passes by Will’s desk, pauses at Beverly’s tablet that sets open.

            Right on Lecter’s articles. Every damn tab of them. Twenty-fucking-tabs of them.

            And because, as Will has come to learn in his lifetime, the world is hell-bent on giving him a genuine ‘fuck you’ with a middle finger, Lecter naturally glances down and sees.

            Will tenses, tastes his own embarrassment in the air at the evidence that shows that he may have more interest in Lecter than he’s willing to show. Without the ability to _see_ , he’s left with Lecter’s body language to tell him what he’s thinking, and that in of itself is a terrifying thing at a time like this. He notes his stance, the curious turn of his shoulders, and the purse of lips as he reads one of the lines –Will wonders if he looks long enough to see _just_ how many tabs are open.

            When he finally looks up, he spares Will a kind smile.

            “I confess that I often feel self-conscious, reading my own work,” he says, and there is no amusement or judgement in his tone.

            “That’s…” Will has no words. His gifts extend to the mental, not the social. A thousand excuses crowd his mind, each one more ridiculous than the last, and he fumbles with his duffle bag before he ultimately drops it on the chair beside him, hands useless at his sides.

            “It’s humbling and relieving to see you have an interest in it. I don’t suppose you are the sort to waste your time with inane writings about ‘overcoming’ and ‘thinking positively’.”

            “You said, ‘mind over matter is only as powerful as the singular mind,’” he says hollowly. “’When a mind, however, is plagued by the many entities surrounding it due to its nature of connection, it is not so much a mind overcoming matter as it is a mind attempting to stop _becoming_ the matter.’”

            “I did.”

            “So,” he continues, uncomfortable, “I agreed with that.”

            “Thank you,” Hannibal says pleasantly. “Truly, I respect your opinion on such matters, since they’re experiences you’ve endured. If I’m ever off base on any future writings, please tell me.”

            He sounds like he means it. The sort of feelings that stem from the realization that Lecter doesn’t find his interest anything to laugh at stay with him, long after he sees Lecter out of HQ and long after he is on a plane to Louisiana, crammed between a Zeller that snores and a Beverly that was smart enough to use the window as the prop for her pillow rather than use Will’s shoulder.

            He thumbs through the many tabs on Beverly’s tablet –he wonders when she’ll finally tire of loaning it out to him –and he wonders at Lecter’s understanding, the sort of person that is perfectly able of seeing without the world-wearying pressure of having to be seen.

-

            Dolarhyde is no such person. In seeing, he is most certainly seen.

            _Can you see me?_

_As I hunt, lurk, dip through the azaleas and rest among the lavender, do you sense that I am near? You who water your garden and tend to it as a master of your world, do you not sense when the hunter draws near to you, when the hunter can smell you?_

Will hunches down among the azaleas and inhales the heavy, drooping scent of them. Fall in Louisiana means that it is cold in the morning and unbearably hot by the afternoon, and sweat drips down the back of his neck to cling to his shirt. He passes ungloved hands along the dirt and inhales Dolarhyde’s calculated steps. It tastes like betrayal and fury. It feels like heavy secrets and fear.

            _When I strike, it is not to kill. To kill is to end, quick sounds that stop because something made them stop; I do not stop, but I Change, I Become. Hands that grasp around your neck, and you beg that I spare our wife? That I would hurt our wife, the love of my life whose flowers adorn our dinner table, whose hands pass along my heartbeat to feel the fear beneath?_

_Just what have We Become? Just what have you done?_

Will stops at the edge of the garden and stares down at the body of a Mr. Hawthorne, the strangulations marks on his neck purpled and hideous. His eyes are bloodshot, his mouth is slack, and Will has the rippling sensation of what it’s like to strangle someone, hands taut and unforgiving against the neck of someone that has betrayed him, someone that has turned on him when it was his _job_ to help him.

            “Will?” Jack prompts lightly.

            Will jerks from his reverie and looks about, hands flexing at his sides. They’re sore, and he wonders just when he’ll have the time to work on his forearm muscle exercises. A quick trip to Wal-Mart should get him the equipment, a simple enough contraption, and –

            -No, no. He’s not going to purchase anything. He’s not trying to strangle _anyone_.

            “…This man has betrayed him,” he says slowly. He says ‘him’, to better avoid saying ‘me’. He tastes it, though, the honest and stark betrayal of the man with whom he placed his trust. “He trusted him to do something, and it wasn’t done.”

            “What did he trust him with?”

            “Not clear,” Will murmurs, and he folds his arms tightly across his chest. His palm presses to the material, and he feels Beverly’s fatigue as she brushed past him at the airport to grab her bag. She hated flying. “Whatever it was, he’s also saddened by this. Angry, but…also saddened.”

            “Has he already moved on from the area?”

            “No. He’s not _here_ , but he’s on the hunt. He’s not…finished.”

            No, no, there was still so much to _do_ , so much to _Become_.

            “Dr. Hawthorne is a psychiatric consultant for the FBI,” Beverly says, off to the side. She holds a file and jots a few notes down, hair teasing the sides of her face and leaping about in the muggy, humid wind. “He was in DC a few months ago working on a couple of projects before returning here.”

            Jack twitches at that, as though he’s been jolted by a quick and sudden shock of electricity. “Maybe he consulted about the RA?”

            It’s his tone, Will decides much later, that makes him do what he does next. His gloves still tucked into his back pocket, Will sidles around Jack and passes a hand along his suitcoat, somehow still on despite the humid southern air that makes patches of sweat collect just underneath Will’s shirt. As he does, he has to swallow back a muted noise at the impressions, the truths that ring through his mind with sharp, startling clarity.

            _“It’s not cause for concern.”_

_“Director Purnell, I’ve got Graham tracking this guy, and you don’t think we should maybe send a small detail to Hawthorne and Slowinski? He got Perkins over the issue of sugar pills; what makes you think he won’t go after the psychiatrist that told him that everything was going to be alright?”_

_“You send out a detail, it draws attention. We’re not trying to draw attention, Jack.”_

It’s quick, like the fluttering of pages under an air vent that suddenly kicked on. He’s tucking his hands into his gloves before Jack can suspect, before anything can be said that would potentially imply that he was abusing his gifts. He can still feel Dr. Hawthorne’s skin particles under his nails; he’ll need to wash his hands.

            “Graham?”

            He looks back at Jack, poised in the doorway to the house –Dr. Hawthorne’s house. Dolarhyde’s house. Will’s house.

            “I…I should go and see m-the wife. Hawthorne’s wife.” He shifts from foot to foot and looks about the backyard, scanning the fence as well as the weeping willows just beyond it. “Dolarhyde is falling in on new identities; he thought of her as his wife as he killed Dr. Hawthorne.”

            “Complete dissociation?”

            “I’d say so.”

            Jack grunts and watches Beverly make a few notes, circling the corpse. “Take your time, Will.”

            “I will,” he promises, and he heads into the house to see what’s become of his wife.

-

            He isn’t part of the door-to-door questioning or security sweeps because it’s an exhausting affair for an empath and Jack doesn’t want to tire him so quickly. Instead, he waits by the FBI vehicles, loitering underneath the mildly cool embrace of a Weeping Willow whose branches dip down around him and cry sap to the grass below. He can feel it, though, as sure of this as he is about the beautiful light that often caught in Mrs. Hawthorne’s hair when the sun struck it, as sure as he is that the mirrors he placed over her eyes finally allowed him to see, and in seeing was seen:

            Dolarhyde is still in the area. Of that he is certain, and of that he is sure.

            He sits down at the base of the trunk and closes his eyes, rubbing his thumbs against the sides of his index fingers in an effort to ground himself. He’d washed his hands, but he still felt the skin of Dr. Hawthorne on his fingerprints. Dolarhyde was a lucky man to only be a Seer and Dreamer –if he’d been a Feeler, killing him like that would have likely killed Dolarhyde, too.

            _You are one of many, many that I seek, many that I will Change because in Changing them, it furthers my own growth, my own Becoming_.

            Will stares out between the spaces of the branches and thinks of his father, of trees that leaned with the heat and grew up only to grow out and down with heavy branches that brushed the ground. Black gum trees whose bark dug into his skin when he touched them, Red Maples that stood so proud. Even young, he’d known they were poor. Even young, he knew there was something wrong with him.

            How else could he explain to his father that he could feel the tree _breathing_?

            His wife once sat beneath this tree and read. He can Dream her steps picking their way around the already fallen leaves, same as he can see her tuck her legs beneath her as she settled on her jean jacket and engrossed herself within the pages of a fantasy.

            Will’s never read a fantasy story because there has always been that hesitation that he’ll be pulled so far into it that he wouldn’t be able to find his way out.

            Instead, as he waits for Jack to exhaust himself with a door-to-door that won’t yield him Dolarhyde’s whereabouts, Will amuses himself with reading Lecter’s articles again. He thinks of Lecter thanking him, his seemingly genuine embarrassment at seeing his own works, and despite having had to feel the grief of murdering his own wife, Will finds it in himself to smile.

-

            He watches the news at the hotel room to try and distract himself. He idly peruses Lecter’s articles, and he wonders how the dogs are –they’re the friendly sort that would happily welcome someone as gentle-spirited as Lecter is. He already misses Winston’s head on his lap, eyes closed in bliss as he rubs a particularly hard to reach spot on his ear.

            Maybe if he was with Winston, he wouldn’t instead still feel the grit of Dr. Hawthorne’s skin under his nails.

            Dolarhyde doesn’t see it as killing; he sees death as a means of change. He changes them, and in changing he too is changed, aided in Becoming something –Will senses the Becoming much like donning an old, familiar coat. It is not a new thing that Dolarhyde wishes to Be, but something that has always been, something that he merely wishes to grow. To develop.

            Betrayal is the taste of Jack on his tongue. Despite Beverly being two doors down, he doesn’t go to her room and ask her to drink with him.

            When the news grows to be too much, he turns it off and paces the hotel floor, unable to take his shoes off because hotels are a certain sort of death trap for an empath, the air itself cloaked in the sensations of the living to the point that it tastes like stale, dead skin cells. Body odor. Impatience and desperation. He pauses and stares down at the file he should be looking through, trying to compare and contrast evidence until he can find just what he’s looking for.

            In reality, he’d find the truth faster if he went and slapped his hands over Jack’s ears and really, truly dug deep.

            He can’t risk a situation like that, though; if he fell in too far, if Jack’s emotions pulled him past the point of his walls and his sense of self, Will can’t be too sure if he’d be able to find his way back. The truth, with all of its capabilities, would probably be just enough to undo him.

            He goes down the hall to get ice for the whiskey. His gloves are tugged taut against his skin, and he shovels ice into the bucket with quick, jerking motions. _Skroosh_. Jack lied to him again. _Th-thump_. _Krshsh._ Jack was lying to Beverly, too. _Skroosh_. Jack could confirm that Dr. Hawthorne had worked with Dolarhyde but refused to say it. _Th-thump_. Sugar pills, a doctor that wielded Dolarhyde’s –the RA, he tells himself –trust like a lumpy rock, and Jack working directly with Kade Purnell. _Skroosh._ Will isn’t so sure that this is a matter of an RA so much as it’s a matter of the FBI maybe making a sore mistake. _Th-thump. Krshsh_. The RA may have happened because Dolarhyde already had a tentative grasp on reality, but something about the FBI in particular spooked him. Betrayed him. Tried to Change him.

            He closes the lid to the ice machine and heads back to the room, walking in and closing the door behind himself.

            He’s then grabbed from behind, a rag pressed tight to his nose and mouth; in his shock, he sucks in a deep breath and tastes something sweet, an odd scent of gasoline in the air. He lungs scream, shout _no, no, no,_ but it’s there, it’s in his breath and it’s _wrong._ Against his cheek, the rag feels like terror and purpose and Dolarhyde’s madness seeps in.

            He’s dragged under a river of bubbles into a dizzying, lurching rest.

-

            He comes to on his hotel bed, and he sits up with a dizzying lurch that makes the room sway and spin. His stomach threatens upheaval, but he holds it down and concentrates on his breathing; short, curt gasps as he tries to figure out just what happened.

            Across from him, Dolarhyde sits still as the grave.

            He is big; bigger than Will expected, bigger than he could certainly take down in a solid fight. Against a plain black t-shirt, his muscles are taut and capable, and he sits with the edge of someone prepared to strike at any moment. He stares at Will impassively, the faint scarring on his lip hitching it as he observes Will.

            “The rag may have overwhelmed you,” he says in the tense, taut silence. “I tried not to touch it too much.”

            “Chloroform only lasts a few minutes,” Will says. It’s slurred, and the words tumble about in his mouth before he can quite articulate them.

            “You were out for two,” Dolarhyde agrees.

            “…I’d better not have liver damage,” Will warns him. Despite the situation, he does care about his liver.

            “If you do, it’s from the drinking and not from me.”

            That’s a fair assessment, and Will nods along with it.

            “I knew you were around. I thought you were…looking for his family. Dr. Hawthorne’s.”

            Dolarhyde tilts his head, and it’s not entirely human. Will knows that if he could just look up to his eyes, pretty as Beverly had called them, he could see what his next step is, maybe be a bit preemptive about it –if he looks, though, Dolarhyde will look, too. He’s an E-2, and one just scared enough to weaponize it like Abigail did.

            God, he can’t have him do what Abigail did. He’ll be too many people, too many people with too many fears. One can only have so many fears before they eat them alive, completely destroy them.

            “…Do you remember me from the academy?” he asks quietly. He speaks with a slow, stilted gait, like he’s afraid of saying the wrong thing.

            “I don’t remember many people from the academy.”

            “I can see that. There was a barrier around you.” He shifts ever-so-slightly in the large, bulky chair and frowns. “Everyone could see the barrier you made. Thick walls and a s-scared boy within.”

            “You dreamed up my walls?”

            “It didn’t take much. You helped me see them, thick walls around a scared but purposeful boy.”

            “Where are your walls now, Agent Dolarhyde?” Will asks softly. “Do I need to help you Dream them?”

            His eyes flash with something, a dark and wicked sort of hunger, then it’s gone. “I think you would, if I asked you to. You’d sacrifice your own mind to touch your skin to mine and help me Dream walls between me and the world.”

            “That’s my job,” Will says. “I help empaths.”

            “You _hunt_ empaths, Agent Graham,” Francis corrects. “I watched them, and you hunted them.”

            In truth, Francis Dolarhyde’s words make more sense than Will’s did. Every time he tried to help, he only made it worse. Every time he tried to find some semblance of goodness to come from his actions, that goodness took their skin and pressed it so tight to his that they became one. He hunts empaths, only Francis decided that he would hunt Will instead.

            “You didn’t come to kill me,” Will says slowly. “You…felt terrified.”

            “I don’t want to kill you, Agent Graham. You’re as much a victim as every other empath.”

            “I’m not a victim,” Will disagrees. Victim means that he doesn’t have a choice in the matter, and Will likes to believe that he’s chosen his path.

            “Who watches the watcher, Agent Graham? Who hunts the hunter?”

            Will thinks of the feeling he’d had when leaving HQ so angrily, that sensation that someone was watching him, eyes on the back of his neck.

            “…I met Reba,” he confesses. He notes Dolarhyde tensing, corded muscles bunching. “I told her that I want to help you, Agent Dolarhyde. She said that you were losing time.”

            “We’re all losing time,” he fires back. “The longer you are in the clutches of those people, you’ll lose time, too.”

            “Were you experiencing blackouts? Were you looking at the watch and realizing hours had passed without you?”

            Dolarhyde stands, and the gun is still trained on Will with calm assurance that he could pull the trigger at any moment.

            “Why did you kill _our_ wife?” Will asks, agonized.

            “She was my wife, too,” Francis replies, aggrieved. “But I had to Change her.”

            “Francis-” Will presses, although he remains on the bed. He’s many things, but he’s not stupid.

            “Do you want to know who I was investigating before I decided that the FBI no longer had my best interests at heart, Agent Graham?” Francis Dolarhyde asks.

            That takes Will aback, and he can only nod helplessly. No one at the Bureau will tell him, and he finds a dark sort of humor in the fact that out of everyone in the world, the RA he’s hunting is the one that’s willing to tell him, to give him the answers that he so desperately needs.

            Francis is at the door, sliding on a black jacket so that he can pull the hood of it up over his face. The shadows of it create devilish hollows on his cheeks, makes his scar look more like a snarl.

            “ _You_ , Agent Graham. Kade Purnell had me investigating _you_.” He pauses, more than likely to savor the sucker-punch expression on Will’s face. “Good night, Agent Graham. Be careful with your walls. I see cracks in them.”

            He’s out of the door before Will can say another word.

            Although every aspect of his training demands that he go after him –at least _call_ Katz or Jack down the hall –he doesn’t. He sits there on the bed, gloved hands pressed to the dirty comforter, and he takes deep, full inhales of the stale and putrid air.

-

            The next morning, after a night of sleeplessness and tossing and turning on a bed that held too many memories, he stands beside the other agents, part of their circle but not _part_ of their circle, and he doesn’t say a single word about Dolarhyde.

            He’s not sure that he could, even if he wanted to.

            _Was there someone like him watching someone like him?_

Yes. Yes there was.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the day late in posting! I was traveling for the weekend because my niece turned four this last Friday! She says hello, thank you for letting me come to her party, and she hopes you enjoy this chapter!
> 
> She's a pretty cute kid tbh.
> 
> I was so excited to introduce Dolarhyde into this chapter tbh, I've been waiting as patiently as I could for it because I adore him/his arc in this!
> 
> Check out my Tumblr for exciting new updates! :)
> 
> A special thanks to EmilyElm, Matilda, Inky_Starlight, Superlurk, and Duhaunt6! You guys are the best <3


	9. What Walls do Crumble

Chapter 9:

            He reads Blake on the plane back, fingers bare against the pages. He waits until Beverly has fallen asleep beside him, tucked up against Zeller, and he hunches over so that they can’t see him remove his gloves, an honest trepidation to his actions like it’s some form of voyeurism. 

            The pages are smooth, the edges thinned from careful hands turning them over the years, and as he flips through the book, he tastes an honest sense of hunger, something genuine and poignant with want. Dr. Lecter devoured the words within, and he pauses on a space where the oils of his fingertips discolored the page ever-so-slightly.  

_“I was angry with my friend;_

_I told my wrath, my wrath did end._

_I was angry with my foe:_

_I told it not, my wrath did grow._

_And I waterd it in fears,_

_Night & morning with my tears: _

_And I sunned it with smiles,_

_And with soft deceitful wiles._

_And it grew both day and night._

_Till it bore an apple bright._

_And my foe beheld it shine,_

_And he knew that it was mine._

_And into my garden stole,_

_When the night had veild the pole;_

_In the morning glad I see;_

_My foe outstretched beneath the tree.”_

            He thinks of Dolarhyde, carving a path of blood through those that betrayed him, and he thinks of Lecter who apparently feels much the same. No rest for those that hate, for those that want. 

            No rest for those that watch, and in doing so are watched. 

            He rereads it and strokes the pages reverently, like he can somehow ingrain the essence of such poised delight, such honest and stark emotion. It’s the first hint of Hannibal Lecter that he can taste with his empathy, and he licks his lips to better savor it. 

            If Dolarhyde was watching Will and found something out that made him question his actions, there had to be some form of trail on it. Whether it be e-mails, files, or some sort of reference, there would be something that could piece together just what he’d found. Had he been set on Will, only to find there was nothing there to see? Had he investigated him, only to find there  _was_ something to find, and it scared him enough that his walls came down? Perhaps there was nothing, yet he was informed that he was to watch until he could find something?

            Perhaps -although Will doubts this with so much emotion that it makes his hands tremble -Dolarhyde was already losing his grasp on reality, and his fears and observations of the FBI were based on nothing more than the troubled mind of a Rogue E-2. 

            If he entertains that notion, though, then he entertains the idea that his being investigated by the FBI was somehow justified; if Will acknowledges that, then he has to acknowledge that there is something fundamentally wrong with him, something that the FBI saw early enough that they wanted to get the grab on it before it slipped from the cracks in his walls that Dolarhyde so easily saw. 

            If he acknowledges that, then he acknowledges that Lecter of all people was wrong to give him a stamp of approval. He passes his hands over the cover of the book and shakes his head, disquieted by the thought. He respects Lecter’s observations, his quick and careful thought processes. If Lecter is wrong about him, what else is he wrong about?

            With his six month review coming up, that sort of thought is a terrifying one indeed. 

- 

            He works late at the HQ, late enough that Jack has gone home and Katz has called him a workaholic over her shoulder as she left. A few guards roam the halls, but still Will works, pouring over the files that he’s allowed to see of Dolarhyde, his past investigations and observations of everyone in the EBAU except Will.

            He works until even the guard on his hall leaves to go and take a break, and that is when he moves. 

            Jack Crawford’s office is just down the hall, after all. 

            The office is unlocked, and he lets himself in with only the mildest sense of guilt. He reminds himself that Jack lied to him, that the links and ties to Dolarhyde and his victims are substantial enough that he may have ‘just’ cause in his actions; by withholding that information, he not only blinds Will but does Dolarhyde an injustice, a man that held a gun to Will, and rather than pull the trigger, said that he was a victim, too. 

            His computer is password protected, but that doesn’t stop an empath. Will removes his gloves and lowers his crumbling walls with care, hands ghosting and gliding along the keys to find the right memory. He feels e-mails, impatience, worry, fear, and a stab of guilt so poignant it tastes like dust from discarded stone.  

            When he feels the secrecy and quickness of a habitual string of letters, he mimics them and he is in. 

            It takes only a few minutes to find the files he’s looking for. Jack had lied before, when he claimed to not have access. First, Will prints his own files, things he’s not necessarily supposed to see but things he feels the need to know, things that have gnawed at him since Dolarhyde told him that he’d been under investigation for a time. He gathers those into a basic brown folder, then pulls up Dolarhyde’s files and prints those, too. He figures he’s got about ten minutes total before another guard does their rounds, and he doesn’t want to be caught in such a compromising place. 

            On a hunch, he prints Hobbs’ files as well, then logs out, gloves snug on his hands as he sees himself out of Jack’s office, then out of the HQ. 

- 

_"Will, get some rest.”_  

_"I’m fine.” Will looked up from his paperwork, frowning at Jack Crawford poised in his doorway._  

_"You’ve been here for days. Have you even been home to your dogs?”_  

_He hadn’t, but that wasn’t the issue. “He’s not killing them, Jack. He’s honoring them.”_  

_"What?”_  

_"He put her back because the meat was bad,” Will continued, and he walked over to the cork board where the pictures of the girls haunted his sleep, haunted his dreams because he knew them so intimately that he could almost taste them. “Elise. So he’s eating them, honoring them, because in this, he…he is protecting his daughter. Honoring her in their place.”_  

_“…You think?” Jack wandered over to look at the photos, hands planted on his hips._  

_“I listened to the recording of his evaluation, and really, that’s what this is,” Will replied, near-reverent. He thinks of the six month review, the questions that made Hobbs uncomfortable, the thoughts that made him go quiet for long periods of time on the recording. “He loves his daughters, worries about her going to college, wants what’s best and thinks of her often enough that he’s slipping up at work._

_"So they say, ‘Agent Hobbs, it’s natural for you to fear her going away. All fathers fear this.’ And this is the part that I think did it, the part that gave him his low score. He says to them, he says, ‘I’ve dreamed her life a thousand ways and a thousand times, and in each and every one we aren’t separated like this. I can’t do this alone; I can’t do this without her.’”_  

_“He has a fixation with his daughter,” said Jack with a severe frown. “These girls are all emulations of her?”_  

_“Yes, yes,” Will affirmed, staring at one. “He’s consuming them, taking them in such a way that he can live without her because he has some aspect of her, some essence that will always remain because if there’s one thing a Dreamer has, it’s their dreams…” He sighed quietly, feeling that statement so deep it burrowed beneath his marrow. “They’ll always have their dreams.”_  

_“And how are your dreams, Will?” Jack wondered, just quiet enough to sting._

_That is when Will remembered himself, remembered that as an E-3 he can’t talk like that, say things that make a neurotypical nervous because they have the power to utterly obliterate him if he’s not careful, if he lets them take his daughter who only just-_  

_-No, no; not his daughter. He’s not Garrett Jacob Hobbs._  

_“…I dream of a vacation when this is over,” he said at last, calm and cool and utterly dishonest. “Camping up in the mountains.”_  

_He wasn’t entirely sure if Jack believed him; he regarded Will with a sort of expression bordering on suspicion as he scratched the side of his neck and shifted. Will went back to his paperwork, circling the desk to sit down._  

_“Katz tells me you haven’t left HQ in days,” he said._  

_“I’ve been working hard, Jack.”_  

_“She said when she asked if you wanted to grab a bite of food, you didn’t seem to hear her,” Jack pressed._  

_Will grunted in affirmation because it occured to him that he wasn’t even aware that Beverly stopped by to pay him a visit._  

_“I know I’ve been pushing you on this one, Will, but-”_  

_“You’ve been on my ass to grab this guy, Jack, and I’m going to get him,” Will cut in, looking up from the file. “You said to me, ‘we gotta do this one quick, Will, I need you to get in his head and really rope him up quick.”_  

_“Not so far in his head you’re not sure where your own is, thoug,” Jack interjected. “Where’s your head, Will?”_  

_“My head is at the Hobbs’ house,” Will retorted sharply. “Where I think that if we really want a shot at getting the RA, Jack, we go through his daughter. You want Hobbs, you get his daughter to lead us to him.”_  

_Then two days later, they made their way to the Hobbs house and the horrors within._  

_-_  

            Will goes to see Abigail in the early morning because enough hours have passed with him tossing and turning in his bed that he can’t sleep. The folders burn a hole in his bag, but he can’t quite bring himself to read them just yet. He has a need, but there is inside of him such a resistance, every inch of him screaming that to open those files, he is not only committing career-suicide but he’s also endangering what little freedom he has.  

            “I owe you a walk,” he says to her as she puts on a supple, snug leather jacket. She spares him a glance, eyes fixed to the side of his cheek before she turns away to fiddle with the laces on her boots. 

            “You don’t owe me anything,” she says curtly. 

            He supposes she’s right seeing as how she’s the reason he feels certain corners of his own mind  crumbling into something insubstantial, but he still escorts her out to the small walkway that leads to a simple, plain garden area. She leans on him, and every aspect of her near him is covered and clothed, a blessed barrier. He wonders if she’ll grab him again if he gets too emotional. 

            “…You haven’t told on me,” she says as she sits down. She tries to sound dismissive, but there is a thread of worry. 

            “I wouldn’t do that to us,” Will replies. He watches her shoe swing in aimless circles, toe dragging through the dirt. 

            “There’s no us,” she replies, but she peeks up to his face as she says it, guilty because she knows what she did, she KNOWS the ramifications of her actions even as she did them. 

            “There is,” he returns calmly. “You flooded my senses, Abigail. It was a conscious, driven act on your part. Whether you wanted it or not, though, you looked into my eyes and saw aspects of me, too.” 

            She doesn’t answer for a few minutes, and he sits down, just far enough that if she tries to take him by surprise again, she can’t. He’s patient. He has more than enough time before he has to be anywhere, and he’s got three files in his bag that would spell the end of his career if he’s caught with them. Perhaps his actions are a form of stalling, but he isn’t quite sure.

            “…You’re so alone,” she says at last, and those words sear him, brand him and leave him shifting farther away from her. “That’s what I saw. I saw…you in a room filled with people, and you are utterly alone. I had my father, I had my mother…who do you have, Agent Graham?” 

            Will thinks of that, a hollow ache in his chest. He has an FBI psychiatrist that watches his dogs sometimes, when she’s not busy. He has a boss that is keeping secrets, and he has an FBI-hired psychiatrist that writes about empaths as though he were one. He has an RA that risked his head start in his race from the FBI in order to warn Will, and he has the sensation of what it felt like to have his neck torn open. He stares at the ground, small shoots of grass that stretched and tore concrete in order to rise to the sky. Nature finds a way.

            He has Eldon Stammets in his dreams sometimes, who was so desperate to connect that he buried innocent people alive. 

            “…Your father used you to murder innocent women,” he says hollowly. “Did you really have him?” 

            “If what I saw of you is what the FBI does to empaths, I’m fine with the price that I paid,” she returns. “I…think of those girls, and I hate myself for it, but based off of what they’ve done to you, I’d say I turned out alright.” 

            He doesn’t have a strong argument for that. Instead of going down that road, he instead asks, “How did he teach you to weaponize your gifts?” 

            Abigail regards him heavily, suspiciously. 

            “I…am in a position where knowing that may very well be what saves my life,” he explains. God, is it really so bleak? Is he really in such dire straits? 

            He thinks of what will happen if they find out that he took those files, and he suppresses a shudder. He’s not in a position to leave any stone unturned.

            “Who is trying to kill you?” she asks. 

            “I don’t know yet,” Will replies. 

            Rather than accuse him of being paranoid, Abigail takes his question with the same severity that he needs her to. She looks about, then scoots closer to him and leans in, to better whisper.

            “It’s…not how you make it sound,” she reveals. “It’s more like…I see your fears and weaknesses, and I can use them against you.” 

            “How?” he asks, voice pitching low to match hers. “How do you see it and stop yourself from being consumed by it?” 

            She gives him an odd look, a twisted expression between pity and pain. From anyone else, it would have made him angry to see such an expression and know that it was leveled at him. After Dolarhyde, though, Will figures he can understand why there’d be such a face made at him. 

            Was he really so twisted up with the FBI? Did they truly hold him on so short a leash? 

            “You…build walls, Agent Graham,” she says carefully. Gently. “And your walls are so strong that you can see by looking through the windows rather than falling in.” 

            “Did you see my walls?” he wonders. 

            “They have cracks in them,” she whispers. “Cracks like glass, splintering. I found you so easily because your walls are beginning to break.”

            She’s not wrong; Dolarhyde saw it that way, too.

            “Do you know how to fix it?”

            “Don’t they teach you that at the FBI?” she asks snidely. 

            He looks out to the leaves that spiral from branches, caught in the wild breeze that blows just overhead. It’s chilly, and he buttons the top button on his coat. He knows the words to say; it’d feel like he was lying to himself to say them, though. 

            “…My six month evaluation is coming up, Abigail Hobbs,” he says instead. The truth tastes like biting into a tree root. Bitter. Gritty. “You know about those, I’d imagine.” 

            “My dad said they were terrifying. They sit another empath near you to gauge your reactions, and a neurotypical digs into your mind,” says Abigail, and she lets out a curt huff of breath, derisive. “It’s invasive and terrifying.” 

            “If you can see the cracks, then they’ll see the cracks,” he says, and he leans back into the bench. The cold from the wood beneath seeps into his pants and chills the bottoms of his thighs. He’ll need to take her inside soon. “You know what happens when they see the cracks.” 

            “I know.” 

            “…I need your help,” he whispers, and it’s glass shards in his mouth to admit it like that. His voice cracks on the way out. 

            “You need to fortify your walls.” 

            “I can fool the neurotypical, but if the empath sees into my mind they’ll turn on me,” he says, aggrieved. 

            “They’ll see it,” she agrees firmly. “When you…when you put your hands to my neck. When you tried to save me, I…” 

            She pauses, and he watches her hands clench and unclench on her lap. Despite her resilience, her manipulations and her desperation, this is as difficult for her as it is for him. She’d almost been murdered by her father, after all. People don’t just walk away from that. 

            Maybe she had cracks in her walls, too; small enough for many to miss, but there all the same.

            “We bled together,” Will whispers. 

            “I saw you as much as you saw me,” she confesses, and she bites her lip so hard that the color flees them. “Even dying, I saw your cracks. My dad was so far in your head…he was so far in, and that’s why we were so scared. It was like killing yourself, wasn’t it? Putting a knife to me?” 

            “I’m sorry,” he says, and he bites the fat of his cheek, hard. 

            “They’ll see the cracks in your walls, Agent Graham,” she says, and she sounds apologetic as she says it. “But I can help you hide them. We can put your secrets somewhere else.” 

            “You can do that?” he wonders. Her power, her strength behind those eyes that held a thousand secrets makes his breath catch, and he looks to her, focusing on the eyebrow quirked just-so. There is the smallest turn of a smile at her lips as she regards him, cracked but not broken, wounded but still strong.

             “I can do that. My father taught me well…with my help, you’ll be able to do it, too.” 

- 

            “Let’s talk about your sex life, Agent Graham.” 

            Will’s neck heats up despite himself, and he turns around to stare at Lecter blankly. In one hand he holds a book of nothing but paintings and art from Botticelli, and in the other he cradles the words of Poe.  

            “Non-existent,” he replies curtly. 

            “I’d imagine that dating is difficult when you’re an empath.” 

            “…People enjoy physical contact as an act of affirmation for attraction,” he replies, although it is somehow like sharing a sordid, embarrassing secret. “They don’t like the gloves. Then, if you can get past the gloves, they want to stare lovingly into your eyes. They want you to dream worlds for them, a space where there is no distinction between you or them.” 

            “People find your gifts to be romantic,” Lecter observes. 

            “That, or they’re repulsed,” says Will cheerfully. He slides the book of Poe back onto the shelf. It feels too dramatic for someone like Lecter, so pleasant and affable as he sits and watches Will invade his work space with no hint of judgement or censure. “I don’t date.” 

            “I’d imagine that what you do have in regards to dating or intercourse would be more along the lines of a random, casual encounter with promises to call that never occur.” 

            Will paces along the strip of wood alongside the rug and focuses on the sturdy sound his shoes make; grounding and heavy. He imagines walls in his mind, strong and tall, reaching to great heights that none could topple.

            “…Sex is…emotionally very painful for me,” he admits. “The emotions run so high that…whatever control I have, I lose. It’s invasive.” 

            “It has been that way since your first experience?” 

            “Yes.” 

            He continues pacing, thumbing through photos and narratives about the paintings of Botticelli. The colors are bold, bright against his eyes. He wonders which ones Hannibal likes, which ones he would most want displayed within the walls of his home.  

            He wonders if sex is as invasive and painful for Hannibal as it is for him. 

            “Tell me about it.”

            “You want to know what losing my virginity was like?” Will’s eyebrows lift, and he glances up from the book. “…I’m feeling very Freudian. Should we discuss my mother, too?” 

            “Only if she’s in correlation to your first experience,” Hannibal replies with a smile. 

            Will laughs raggedly and snaps the book shut, leaning back against Hannibal’s desk to survey him. He rubs the back of his neck awkwardly and sets the book down, glancing away from him. Recounting the memories is never a pleasant affair; normally it begins at a bar when someone is taking the time to come onto him, before he can form the words around a heavy tongue that he’s not what they’re looking for. 

            “Her name was Molly,” he says after a while, and the name blisters on his tongue. “She was…sweet. I met her right outside of the academy. Just turned nineteen, and she wasn’t at all afraid of me.” 

            “Was she sympathetic to you?” 

            “Yes. Very understanding. We…waited a long time. I liked her, and I had fortresses for the things I Dreamed. She was…beautiful. Small town girl beautiful.” 

            “What happened?” 

             Will hated thinking this part, let alone admitting it to someone. “I dissociated. Completely. She just…had so much love for me, so much need, and I couldn’t be that. I couldn’t…differentiate between her and me. I had a need for something that I didn’t know, a person that I both was and wasn’t. 

             “I don’t entirely remember what happened. But I know that I panicked and I left her there. I snapped out of it sometime around five in the morning, and when I finally got a hold of her on the phone, she told me it was over.” 

             He finishes his confession and stares Hannibal down, daring him to shame him for it. His expression is the same impassive, calm face of someone used to hearing sordid, embarrassing things and not using them against anyone. Will isn’t quite sure if he should feel relieved or if he should feel mild displeasure at being unable to rattle him. 

            “And since then, you have not once allowed yourself to open up to anyone?” Hannibal asks lightly. 

            “Not like that. Maybe a random, chance meeting. Usually I’m drunk enough that it either makes the experience numbed enough that it sounds like a good idea, or I’m drunk enough that I just fall asleep and wake up the next morning with them gone.”

            “Do you take them to your home?”

            Will laughs and continues pacing, breaking eye contact. He can see him, though, just out of the corner of his eye. He thinks of what it’d be to bring someone to his home with genuine intent, someone that could walk into the space and not leave anything behind to trouble him when they’re gone. Such a thing couldn’t truly exist.

            “I don’t let many people into my house,” he says after a bit, and he stops long enough to glance back. “Most people are…invasive. Uncomfortable with the set-up.”

            “I’ll admit to surprise when I saw that you kept your bed in the front room,” Hannibal agreed. “Although I don’t make assumptions based off of someone’s sleeping habits.”

            In truth, the compact notion of having all of his things confined to one simple, small area of the house makes things far easier for Will to compartmentalize rather than have it strewn about, but he remembers the first time Alana saw the layout, how her brow had furrowed and dipped in. Dr. Lecter may not have made assumptions, but Dr. Bloom certainly did.

            “It’s too personal to have many people there,” Will says. “Their imprint remains long after.”

            “You’ve made your home its own sort of fortress, and to have it sullied by so many hands would mean you don’t have a quiet place, even when they’re gone.”

“That, and the dogs don’t always like every person that shows up,” Will agrees with a wry smile. “By the way, thank you for looking after them. They look well fed and spoiled.”

            “It was no trouble to me,” Hannibal assures him. “I love animals.”

            “I guess that means you’re not a psychopath, right? Psychopaths generally torture and mutilate animals before they move onto people,” Will says thoughtfully.

            Hannibal laughs a little, and Will stares at him, the fine lines and crinkles around his eyes, the dips near his mouth. It sounds genuine, but then again everything about Hannibal Lecter seems genuine. He is a person that knows exactly where he stands and what he is going to do, the paths he will take that lead him to wherever he wants to go.

            Which begs the question: is he aware of just what the EBAU is doing? Did he know that Will was being investigated before he was assigned a psychiatrist?

            Will wonders what the kind doctor would say if Will removed the files from his bag and showed them to him. They burn holes near the edges of the zipper, daring someone to look close enough to see just what he’s done. Would Dr. Lecter help him? Would he take one look and turn him in to Jack Crawford, holding onto the scruff of his neck as one would scold a child?

            That’d make Will an RA, too.

            “I’m not a psychopath,” Hannibal assures him, and Will smiles a little.

            He likes Dr. Lecter, but he’s not entirely sure if he can trust him. That burns worst of all.

-

            He takes the book at the insistence of Hannibal, and when he returns home he removes his gloves and passes his hands over every inch of his house. The feelings there are stale, like old newspaper left under the glare of the sun too long, but they are still present. He gets the sensation of dog slobber, of tails fwapping against the legs of a chair.

            He also gleans the honest, stark taste of curiosity, of hands that too passed over the dusted tabletop like they were looking for something. Searching. Wanting. There is no maliciousness to the actions; no hint of secrecy or ill intent. Instead, Will senses a profound need, a hunger much like it’d felt when he touched his fingertips to the pages that Hannibal Lecter read so often in his book of Blake’s poetry.

            Will may be curious about Dr. Hannibal Lecter, but if the way he gently caressed the magnifying glass near his tackle is anything to go by, the good doctor is interested in Will, too.

            It’s that thought that sees him to bed with ease, even as he has to tuck Mrs. Hawthorne in to do it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Back to our regularly scheduled posts!
> 
> Thank you so very, very much for all of the love this has gotten. I've seen a lot of people talking about the solar eclipse, so maybe it's some kind of good luck to be posting on this day? ;) 
> 
> A special thanks to my patrons, Emily Elm, Matilda, Sylarana, Inky-Starlight, Superlurk, and Duhaunt6! You're the best :)


	10. What Tired Eyes do See

Chapter 10:

_“You’re Will Graham.”_

_Will looked up, his gaze stopping just shy of meeting someone’s eyes. He paused mid-bite and held his sandwich, poised as a shield of sorts between him and the man in front of him._

_“Yes.”_

_He was a stout, average-sized man clad in a suitcoat and aged dress shoes. His darker skin was pockmarked, wrinkled from time and hard work. FBI by the looks of him, although Will was certain that most people he met with these days were FBI. Graduating from the academy and going on to university did that, he supposed; he was an E-3, and everything he’d learned from psychiatrists to lecture halls to the Channel 5 news taught him that that was indeed a rare thing to be._

_“Can I sit down?”_

_Will glanced to the blanket he had spread out underneath him, and he nodded an assent, swallowing a half-chewed bite of food with difficulty. He’d have to wash it later, but one thing he knew without really having to know was that you didn’t say ‘no’ to an FBI agent, especially if you wanted a job from them the way he did after graduation._

_“My name is Jack Crawford,” he said, although he didn’t extend a hand to shake. Will’s hands were gloved, but he appreciated that this Jack wasn’t going to risk something like that, all for the sake of common social expectations. “I’ve heard a lot about you.”_

_“Director of the EBAU?”_

_“Yes.”_

_Will nodded and set his sandwich down, brushing stray crumbs from his gloves. They were nice, just thin enough that he didn’t feel as though his hands were bulky, but not so thin that they threatened to come apart. They’d been a gift from one of his teachers._

_It looks like you’ve got promise, based off of what your reports say,” Jack said lightly. “You’re interested in the EBAU?”_

_“I’ve been considering it, yes,” said Will, and he turned a chip over in his palm before he popped it into his mouth. “I’ve heard some good things and some bad things about empaths in the EBAU.”_

_“What have you heard?” Jack asked._

_“They get burnt out pretty quickly with the constant work,” Will replied after a moment of thought. School taught him tact, the way to speak to someone while avoiding offense. Common sense taught him that he would be right to say his words with care when speaking to someone that could be his potential boss someday. “It’s grueling.”_

_“It’s grueling,” Jack Crawford agreed. “And there’s no guarantee of success. I’ve had people go into the FBI-EBAU training and ultimately fail. I’ve had them walked out, and I’ve had them carried out. It’s not an easy job.”_

_“Nope,” Will agreed._

_“So my question for you, Will Graham, is why you’re interested in doing it? As an E-3, there are a lot of career opportunities that could be lined up for you without you having to risk your psyche.”_

_Will’s psyche was common enough talk. He’d grown used to it, over the years, the casual way people mentioned his state of mind. It was like the cancer patient sitting at the dinner table, everyone discussing their condition without any true consideration to the one actually enduring it._

_He looked across the lawn, tracked a few people making their way to class. He wasn’t much in the way of friends at the Academy, much to the woes of his teachers. He couldn’t quite track their casual mannerisms, their behaviors and mode of speech. More often than not, he was off to the side of them, hearing but not entirely listening. They were disquieted by him as much as he was uncomfortable by them._

_“…I want to help people,” he said at last, and he picked up his sandwich to take another bite. He spoke around his food, gauging Jack’s reaction to the lack of general manners. “I thought about my career, and…I have these gifts. They’re troublesome at times, but they’re useful. I could be useful to you.”_

_“Do you think so?”_

_“Yes.”_

_“What makes you think that?” Jack asked._

_He swallowed a mouthful and wiped his mouth. “I know your wife has cancer, and she’s dying. I know your air conditioner in the car must be broken, and I know that your cat can only rub up on your leg for so long before it’s a pain and you nudge them away.”_

_Jack looked like a sour mix between pleasant surprise and mild distaste at being read so bluntly. His lips puckered, twisted at the mention of his wife and he turned his head to survey the other empaths hurrying to and from class, Will part of them but just not quite_ _part of them._

_“…You got all that from a glance?” Jack asked once he could control his voice rather than sound annoyed._

_“No.”_

_“Then how’d you know?” he demanded._

_“Teachers talk about your wife all of the time,” Will said, ticking off his fingers as he spoke. “Your dress shirt and jacket are wet and smell like Freon, and there’s cat hair on the bottom of your leg. Only about halfway around the cuff, so they started to rub up on you and you stopped them.” He shrugged carelessly, lowering his hands and avoiding Jack’s suspicious expression._

_“…That’s observant of you,” Jack said slowly._

_“If I can glean all that just from being observant and listening, just think what happens when I actually use my gifts,” Will said, and he took a mildly triumphant sip of soda. He was eighteen, and the world felt more or less at the tips of his fingers, despite being an empath. “You don’t just want me for the EBAU, Agent Jack Crawford. You need me.”_

            Will is just about to open his file when he gets a call.

            He should have opened it the night before, but the chilling thought of Dr. Lecter being part of the things happening around him was too much; he’d paced the confines of his house for most of the night before succumbing to a restless sleep. He drags his fingers around the corner edge of the file and answers his phone, mulling over an odd feeling in his gut, like he’s committing a grievous sin just by having these.

            He deserves the truth, though, doesn’t he? Even the parts of it that hurt?

            “Graham.”

            “Will, it’s Jack. I’m sending an address, and I need you here, stat.”

            “Is it Dolarhyde?” Will asks. He stands up from his dining room table and scoops the files into his bag, propping his phone up by his ear. The idea of Dolarhyde striking so soon (probably striking against Slowinski, wherever _they_ were) makes his skin tingle, and he zips up his bag with jittery fingers.

            “It’s the stag-man, Will.” Jack sounds aged, old and weathered. “I told them you’re already up to your elbows in this, but he’s struck again and the Feeler can’t get a good grip on it. I said you could swing by.”

            Not Dolarhyde, but the copycat. The stag-man, Jack called him. Will mulls that over, pausing by his wallet and keys near the door. The dogs watch with rabid attention, and he pets Buster who was tenacious enough to climb onto the armchair for one last pet.

            _This is the sort of thing you have the capacity to be._

“Jack…”

            “I know you’re working hard on the case, but they need help. Can you do it?”

            It’s an innocent question, but it raises the hairs on the back of his neck. He supposes that it’s that damn tone once again that sets his teeth on edge. Can you do it, like he has enough on his plate without Jack giving him something else to worry over, something else to do. Can you do it, like empaths left and right can’t see his walls cracking, like sooner or later this is going to make him spill over the edges of his finely crafted safe space until there’s nothing left of him but the memories and feelings of everyone else crammed inside.

            Can you do it? Jack asks him.

            “You need me, Jack, I’m there,” Will says, and he’s out the door, locking it behind himself. At this point and time, he can’t afford to say no. The tingle, the lingering sensation sits just against his skin, a reminder that he is being watched, even now. Even now, there is someone that lurks, taking notes and making observations that more than likely determine his future within the EBAU, whether he likes it or not.

            “Thanks, Will,” Jack says, pleased. “I’ll text the address.”

-

            It’s a house of mirrors that Will is led to, and he has to wade through curious onlookers nearby in order to reach the police line. People whisper, quick hisses like sharp needles, and he is careful with his sleeves as he brushes by them, avoiding their eyes. Large crowds, and he has to focus especially hard on his walls, how sturdy they are. Dreamers have imaginations that run the gauntlet, shift and become realities as well as their distortions. He glances to the side, spies a spilled slushie, and he can see the child that tripped as their mother hurried them along.

            He ducks beneath the police line, the corner of it dragging across his ear –the officer that put it up was impatient, harried. Death was common, but not this sort. Not in this town, not in his repertoire.

            He spies Dr. Lecter standing near Alana, but he doesn’t acknowledge them. There’s an odd twist in his gut, their dipped heads and quick mouths turned from the breeze that sluices through the various carnival stands to nip at exposed skin. His nose is cold already, and he rubs it, continuing his path towards the walkway where Jack waits.

            He can’t trust Alana –she’s employed by the EBAU. He can’t trust Hannibal?

_The Caverns of the Grave I’ve seen, and these I show’d to England’s Queen. But now the Caves of Hell I view, Who shall I dare to show them to?_

_Me, Agent Graham; you show them to me._

            It’s a bitter thought that his words shared within the confines of their space could become twisted, used against him. Even when he sees Hannibal Lecter turn towards him out of the corner of his eye, he doesn’t pause to acknowledge him. Lecter potentially sharing his uncomfortable sexual encounters with Jack is fine. Hannibal sharing any bouts of _instability_ , however…

            “How are you, Will?” Jack asks.

            “Cold,” he says, and he follows him along the steps to the house of mirrors.

            Overhead, in cheerfully oblong letters, the neon lights glow and flicker in welcome. Will ducks his head underneath and blinks into the shaded gloom that smells of the sweat of children, the stale smell of vomit, and bleach cleaner. It’s warmer, though, more contained.

            The mirrors bounce his reflection about, first short and fat, then skinny and oblong. Each turn and curve of his person is reflected through the mirrors on every which side with reckless and random shapes, and it’s with a slow, unsteady gait that he navigates behind Jack towards where the body is. At one particular corner, when he opens his mouth to ask Jack the particulars, his mouth gapes and his teeth look far too large. Predatory. He closes his mouth and counts the many angles and distortions of his person with every passing mirror.

            “Victim is Randall Tier, male, twenty-two years old,” Jack says, pausing at a corner. He turns back to Will and frowns, the deep lines of his face grooved and unpleasant. “It’s messy.”

            So was the Hobbs house. Will nods seriously, steels himself, then steps into the other room with his walls firmly intact.

            It’s messy.

            He has to stare for a long, long time before he can quite talk himself into lowering his walls. The Dreams are already unfolding, though, taking him to a space in which he can’t quite grasp onto any of his footholds, and when he takes a breath he can almost _feel_ his pupils expanding as he falls into the eyes of the person long dead, even as his hands that are suddenly ungloved comes down to rest at his shoulders.

            _You who hide, you who lurks beneath this mask, this façade where all is well and good, where your innermost thoughts are tamped down through chemicals and strict schedule; just where do you place your dreams?_

_Eye to eye we look, yet yours are glazed, distanced. There is nothing more to you than the fact that your heart beats, your lungs expand and contract. You exist, but to what end? To what end can you live when the only thing that you can say with utmost assurity is that you are alive?_

Each swift, smooth cut of the scalpel is magic. Each layer that curls and peels down, sinew clinging to the space where muscle and skin would connect creates a sheen until it splits and allows the skin to lay flat, revealing the truth beneath.

            Revealing the monster beneath.

            He stops at the neck, having peeled away the skin that shows the man, revealing the muscle and bone in grotesque manner that reflects by the thousands within the mirrors abound. Mirrors, mirrors that reflect, distort, change reality until there is nothing there of the truth any longer. With calm hands they work, a steady breath. Their heartbeat keeps even time, as this is not the first time they have killed, nor is it the last.

            _I who Dreamed you this world in which you could be who you were meant to be; you who trusted me to show you just how wonderful this life could become. I harbor no ill will at your choice to let them sedate you, allowing them to Change you._

_You are now no more than a tool, though, a tool to help another change and grow:_

_Can you see, Agent Graham? Do you not understand what they’re trying to force you to be?_

Will throws his barriers up at the question, the ringing clarity that reflects and refracts around his walls. Can you see? Can you see?

            _Can you see?_

“He’s an empath,” Will says, and his voice trembles. He looks around for Jack, but it is with startling realization that he’s alone in the room, alone and ultimately vulnerable as he sees himself the way the rest of the world probably does: oblong, obscure, rendered in shadows and ultimately disarming. His knees are in the puddle of blood that’d collected around the body, and he stands up with a start, ungloved hands flexing and curling to fists. When had he ungloved them? When had he moved so close?

            _Can you see?_

“Jack?” he calls out, and he skirts the victim whose skin peeled back from their face rests just at knee-height, slumped into a fashion of kneeling. Randall’s hands reach for his neck, grasping, as though he could tear away the fabric that he constructed around himself, all for the sake of keeping everyone around him happy.

            _Can you see?_

He winds through the halls, but there is no Jack. There is only his face, his gaunt and horrifyingly twisted face staring back at him, and he’s just beginning to lose his breath when he is grabbed from behind and is wrenched around sharply.

            “I-”

            “Agent Graham,” Hannibal says lightly, calmly. His grip is not hard, although it is firm. He passes a hand along Will’s shoulder, then stops and releases him, lips twitching into a frown. “Are you alright?”

            “…Yes,” Will says slowly, and he takes a step back. Just over Dr. Lecter’s shoulder, his eyes are the size of pinpricks, although his forehead juts out comically. “Where’s Jack?”

            “He received a call and stepped outside,” he replies. “I thought to come in and see if you’re alright.”

            “I’m fine,” he lies, and he curls his bottom lip into his mouth.

            Lecter cants his head just-so, although whatever thought crosses his mind doesn’t show through his eyes. It’s the first time Will finds himself frustrated at the fact, truly and honestly bothered by it because if he could just _see_ then he’d know whether or not it was safe to tell Hannibal Lecter what was going on.

            _Can you see?_

            “…The…the killer here is an empath,” Will says because he can tell that Dr. Lecter is waiting for him to say something, _anything_ other than ‘I’m fine.’ “He…he knew his victim. He dreamed him walls, barriers, potentials for what he could be, but…when the victim didn’t take the offer, he instead killed him.”

            “You felt his empathic abilities?”

            “I _heard_ him,” Will whispers. His hands flex, curl, then stretch as he swings his arms. Over Lecter’s shoulder, his face twists and bows in. “He’s…he’s taunting me.”

            “Taunting you?”

            “He’s-”

            Will stops himself right there, though, pausing on the expression in Lecter’s eyes. In truth, it’s a micro-expression –if he hadn’t been staring so intently, he’d have missed it.

            Excitement. Curiosity.

            “He’s?” Lecter prompts gently.

            _Can you see?_

“…It feels like a taunt, at least,” Will says instead, and he looks away from Lecter. How far can he backtrack before Lecter is certain of his instability? Has he already said too much, given too much? Were his words poised to become weapons against him, and he only just barely caught Lecter’s excitement in finally having the excuse to tell jack to pull the plug? He pats aimlessly over his pockets, trying to find his gloves, and he gives a start when Lecter reaches for him in the gloom of the mirrors and grabs his hand, stilling it. His own hands are gloved from the chill outside; perhaps that is the only reason he was comfortable in reaching.

            “Agent Graham, you don’t have to censor yourself,” he says lightly. “I’m here to be a grounding rod for you in cases such as this.”

            Will very carefully pulls his hand from Lecter’s grasp, nodding mutely.

            “I should find Jack,” he says, and he shifts, turning about to hunt for the exit.

            Out of the corner of his eye, Will sees Lecter prepared for a mild fight; after a tense breath, though, the expression fades to a congenial, calm expression, and he nods.

            “To Agent Crawford, then,” he says, and he leads Will out of the house of mirrors.

            Outside, Jack is still on the phone, although he nods in understanding when he sees Will. Will wonders if the blood on the knees of his slacks will stand out in the fall afternoon, or if he wore a dark enough shade to hide it.

            “…Is something the matter, Will?” Dr. Lecter asks. His back is to Jack, and Will can practically feel the unspoken attempt at meeting his eyes. He can’t look at him, though; he thinks of the articles that he’s read so many times the words are imprinted on his eyelids, and he grits his teeth. He wants to trust Lecter. He _needs_ to trust Lecter.

            “You’re my psychiatrist, aren’t you, Dr. Lecter?”

            “Yes. Was that not clear before?”

            “You’re employed by the FBI, though.”

            “They did hire me, yes.” He shifts, crowding into Will’s personal space. “You’re shutting me out. Has something happened?”

            Had something happened? Will watches the forensics team heading into the room of mirrors, the annotator nearby, watching him with an expression of distaste, seeing as how he’d managed to slip in there without her. The cold air stings his cheeks, and he shrugs, non-committed.

            “I think I’m just tired, Dr. Lecter.”

            “You have been withdrawn since returning from Louisiana.”

            “Maybe it was the invasive questions about my sex life,” Will returns hotly. “Who knows?”

            Rather than match his snark with aggression, Lecter has the grace to look away from him. He tracks Jack’s pacing, much like Will does, tucking his hands into his pockets.

            “I would apologize, but you know that I’m not sorry,” he says lightly. “However, if I ask any question from you that you find to be invasive, please tell me in the future. I am here to be of help to you, not a hindrance.”

            “…I don’t care about you knowing about my sex life,” he says heavily. “What would you do with that sort of information?”

            “Wonder at your lack of any emotional ties that extend from the FBI. You have no outlet for your troubles, no emotional support in times of need.”

            He isn’t wrong, although it sting. It was something much like what Abigail said, sitting side-by-side in a hospital garden.

            _You’re so…alone._

“If you had access to the truth, Dr. Lecter, would you want to know?” Will asks. “No matter how ugly, how damning it was, wouldn’t you want it?”

            “Yes,” he replies without hesitation, and he rocks back onto his heels. Just a short distance away, Jack is hanging up the phone. “Ignorance is bliss, but anyone can make a paradise from their reality if they’re tenacious enough to take it.”

            Jack walks over before Will has a chance to reply, and he shifts, putting some distance between them. His fingers rub together, confined in their gloves, and he tucks his hands behind his back so that he can better remove them without notice.

            “He’s an empath, Jack,” Will says, and Jack pauses, mouth open and slack with the words he was about to say. His mouth snaps shut, and he shifts, looking between Hannibal and Will. He suddenly looks much older.

            “An empath.”

            “Sounds like a Dreamer, and one powerful enough to weaponize it,” Will explains. “He knew him personally.”

            “I got some records pulled from this guy by Zeller back at HQ.”

            “I thought that he was working on Dolarhyde?”

            “They need their best on this, Will,” Jack says wearily. “If he’s a Dreamer, it’s no wonder our Feelers can’t get anything from him.”

            “Can empaths use their gifts as weapons like this?” Hannibal asks.

            Will and Jack exchange a look before Will glances over and nods slowly, once.

            “It’s not…common,” he says. “It’s actually illegal.”

            _So is hiding an empath right underneath the nose of the FBI. So is stealing confidential files from your boss._

“Would it be an agent, then?”

            Will gives Jack a look, and they shift about uncomfortably. Awkwardly. “Another RA?” Will asks quietly. “I didn’t get that impression. This was calculated, not…a fractured mind.”

            “I’ll get a hold of Director Purnell,” Jack says reluctantly. “You’re sure it’s not Dolarhyde?”

            “Dolarhyde felt as though he was…slipping downhill. This person is in complete control of everything they do.” _Even as they taunted you with it._

_Can you see, Agent Graham? Do you not understand what they’re trying to force you to be?_

“We may have to do a full empath examination,” Jack says, and god he just sounds so _tired_. “Time that with Dolarhyde, we just don’t-”

            “I’ll find him, Jack,” Will promises, and he sounds so sincere that even Will almost believes the words as he says them. As he passes by Jack, he allows his hand to glide along his back, pausing to pat his shoulder ever-so-slightly. “Don’t worry. I’ll find Dolarhyde. Then we’ll find this guy.”

            He waits until he’s far enough away that Jack won’t notice him sliding his gloves on, palms tingling with the secrets that he was able to steal.

-

            That night, the files sit on his table, tempting him. He paces before the only mirror in the house –the one in his bathroom–before he stops in front of it and grabs onto the counter, staring at himself.

            Staring into his eyes.

            He doesn’t fall into them the way that he does with everyone else. According to Abigail, though, that is something that he needs to learn to do, to crawl within the spaces of his own mind so that he can see what other empaths could see.

            He stares at his eyes for a long time. The awkward seconds roll to minutes. Minutes become an hour. Then two.

            After two and a half, he gives up and sits down on the toilet seat, head in his hands. Apparently, the only person that _can’t_ see into his mind, is him.

            Then again, he could very well be distracted by what he gleaned off of Jack when he brushed against him earlier:

            _Keep watching Graham –if he continues to go and see Abigail Hobbs, let me know._

_We’re going to try and track down Slowinski, maybe beat Dolarhyde to him. He’s getting revenge, you know. We’ve pissed off an E-2 that knows how to weaponize his gifts._

_No, Graham never learned to weaponize his talents. I’d know it if he had._

_If he learns how, I’ll find out. We’ll retire him._

_I’m not concerned, though. Will Graham needs us as much as we need him._

He thinks of whoever it is that’s now killed two people, two people that Will didn’t know, but now knows in a fundamentally _wrong_ way. They are trying to tell him something, _show_ him something –just who are they that know his troubles and rather than run and tell the FBI, they instead want to help him? Just who are they that see the way blood drips through the crevices of his mind and can somehow see the beauty of it rather than the obscenity?

            _Can you see_?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> :) Thank you guys so much for all of your support!! I've had so much fun writing this/working on this and I'm just so thankful and happy that you guys have, too!
> 
> A special thanks to my patrons: Emily Elm, Sylarana, Matilda, Inky-Starlight, Duhaunt6, and Superlurk! <3


	11. What Shaking Hands do Feel

Chapter 11:

            He stands in the grocery aisle and stares at the cereal for far longer than one normally stares at cereal. Will would like to think that it’s because he’s honestly torn between ‘Cocoa Cream of Wheat’ versus ‘Maple Cream of Wheat’, but in reality he’s exhausted, plagued by dreams where he stood before his bathroom mirror and peeled the skin off of his face. Each time he woke, his nails were dug into his skin, small, livid crescents that he worries are still present if one squints just the right way. He blinks the dregs of sleep from his eyes and wonders if the employees would mind if he just eats the coffee grounds straight from the bag in his basket.

            _Can you see?_

            “What’s your favorite?”

            He looks to the small child that stands nearby, devoid of a parental figure. A quick scan of the aisle shows that they stand alone, but they don’t seem perturbed. He licks chapped lips and glances back to the rows upon rows of sugar-coated cardboard, feigning interest.

            “I’d say…this one,” he says, pointing towards one labeled ‘Fruity Pebbles’. “Have you tried it before?”

            “That one gets stuck to my teeth,” the child says, pointing towards their teeth. They’re missing the front two, a fact that they’re proud of. Will can see it in their smile, the way their hand lingers near their mouth before they let it gape just enough to show it off.

            “What’s your favorite?” he asks.

            “I like this one,” they say, and they reach up on their tip-toes in order to haul down a huge box of Life cereal.

            “That’s a healthy cereal,” says Will with a small smile.

            “I can like healthy cereal.”

            “You can,” Will agrees. He looks about once more, and spying no adults nearby, he kneels down so that he can be level with the child. “Where are your parents?”

            “Looking at the cans,” they say. “Why do you have purple under your eyes?”

            That takes him a moment, until he thinks of the shadows and dips just under his eyes from poor sleep.

            “I colored it. What do you think?” he turns his head to the side to better show them.

            “It’s silly.”

            “It is.”

            He glances to the side once more, then looks back and ventures, “What cans are your parents looking at?” 

            “Baking aisle,” the child says, and Will nods. 

            “I think that we should go find them,” he decides, and he stands up, offering his gloved hand to them. The child readily accepts it, squeezing tight, and he marvels at it for the briefest of moments, that a child would grab onto his hand so willingly. Gloved, their presence and blind trust are mere ideas, something made powerful moreso by its ambiguity rather than its steadfast statement. He squeezes their hand back lightly, and he heads to the grocery aisle. 

            Their parents are overjoyed and confused when he hands the child over, and there is an air of suspicion coupled with their relief. 

            “I’m an officer,” he explains, to settle the fears that lurk in their eyes. Better officer than having to explain FBI Agent, he figures. “I thought it better I bring her to you than let them wander around the grocery store.” 

            “Thank you, sir,” the father says, and he scoops the child up to properly keep a hand on them. “Normally, she’s not the type to wander off. Are you, honey?” 

            “He colored purple under his eyes,” she says, and she points. 

            “Don’t point,” her mother scolds. 

            “Where was she?” 

            “Cereal aisle.” 

            “I wanted Life Cereal,” she explains. 

             “Thank you, sir,” the mother says graciously. When she smiles, her lips curve naturally, without hesitation. “Never a day off for law enforcement, right?” 

            “Never,” he agrees, and he sees himself down the aisle, all the while the small girl’s parents waste their breath trying to explain why it’s not safe to wander off and talk to strangers. 

            Will has never really been given that sort of consideration, blind trust because he’d been kind, because his actions say he is a decent person. Usually, his interactions circulate the hushed whispers of ‘he’s an E-3’ and ‘that’s the only E-3 not stuck in an institution.’ 

            Given the way of his mind, Will figures they’d better work harder at ingraining a sense of distrust in that little girl. He may have been kind, but the thoughts that circulate his crumbling mind certainly aren’t. 

- 

            Alana is waiting for him in his office, and whatever hope he’d had in reading the files then are set to the wayside. They whisper, reaching for her with their sordid secrets. Despite her kindness, Will is well aware that she would take one look at them and turn him in to Jack -worse still, Director Purnell, Dolarhyde’s old boss. 

 _I will not give you leave to obtain it_. 

            “I thought I’d check up on you,” she says as he sets his things to the side and boots up his computer. He tosses his backpack and a shopping bag to the side, onto the uninhabited chair. 

            “I went grocery shopping,” he explains when she looks from the grocery bag to him. “I was out of coffee.” 

            “No time after work?” 

            “I’ve been working late hours.” 

            “How late?” 

            Will frowns at the question, the sensation of something more underneath her words. He glances up to her, studies the curve of her cheek, the hesitation in her mouth. Reading Alana is easy, even when he can sense her attempting to not be read. 

            “Not obsessively late,” he says, sharper than intended. “Not RA sort of late.” 

            “No one thinks you’re going to be an RA.” 

            “Liar.” 

            Alana leans back in her chair and crosses a leg, arms folding over her chest as a barrier of sorts. Despite her understanding of empaths, she certainly hates that Will can read her so well. 

            “No one thinks that you’re going to be an RA, but you have to understand, Will,” she says. Will sits back and gets comfortable, mimicking her stance with sardonically rapt attention. “With Hobbs…you got too close. You’re going to visit Abigail Hobbs quite often-” 

            “She has literally no one in this entire world that-” 

            “-and all anyone is worried about is whether or not you’re seeing her as a federal agent or as her father,” she continues, talking over him.  

            Will grits his teeth and shifts his stance. “I’m not her father. We…I touched her neck as she died, Dr. Bloom. She finds…relief that there is someone that knows  _exactly_ what it is that she went through that day. It makes her feel less alone.” 

            That makes Alana pause. Perhaps, in their suspicion, no one thought to question that, to wonder if Will’s meeting Abigail was at her request or his own. That says something to Will, that they first suspected his mind of fractures rather than question the state of Abigail’s. 

            Granted, their suspicions aren’t without merit, but it tells him more than he was looking for, none-the-less.  

            “We’re just worried, Will,” Alana says at last. 

            “I’d say not to worry, but…that’s your job. You worry about empaths, I hunt empaths, Dolarhyde watched empaths, and Hobbs once was an empath. We all have our place.” 

            “You  _help_ empaths, Will. You don’t… _hunt_ them,” Alana corrects softly. 

            “I hunt them down so that you, the psychiatrist, can help them,” he says, and he’s backtracking because he can hear Dolarhyde’s tone in his voice as he speaks, a sneer that says the FBI isn’t as innocent as it seems.  

            God, if he could just  _read_ the  _fucking files…_  

            “You’re crucial to that, though. Jack told me that he’s given you another case, and really I don’t think it’s healthy.” 

            “It’s another empath, although I don’t think it’s an agent. Unregistered, non-fractured mind. They’ve weaponized their gifts. Jack feels like I’m the only one that can find them.” 

            “Can you?” Alana wonders. “When you’re under this much pressure?” 

            “I can find them,” he assures her, and he leans back in his chair to stretch. “I’ll find them, I’ll find Dolarhyde, then you can step in and help them build walls that make them…better.” 

            “Don’t hold the guilt of Abigail Hobbs over your head, Will,” Alana says firmly. “That, no matter what happened, was a win. Don’t feel bad for yourself in that regard.” 

            Will thinks of Abigail risking everything so that he can build walls and protect himself,  _weaponize_  himself, and he nods in agreement. He logs into his computer and pulls up his e-mail, finally looking away from Alana who radiates poise, honestly, strength, but above all a sense of justice that just isn’t contusive to his work at this moment. 

            “I don’t pity myself,” he assures her, logging into his e-mail. As it loads, he leans back in his chair and regards her with something akin to amusement, that he can read her so well as he blatantly lies and keeps Abigail’s secret for another day. “With Abigail…I feel…good. I feel like I’m doing good.” 

            “Good, Will,” she says with a genuine smile. “Dr. Lecter said that you’ve been reading books he’s loaned you.” 

            That makes his stomach drop. 

            “…Yes,” he says slowly, and he can sense the shift in her cadence, the sudden change of her tone. It tastes like resignation. 

            “I was a little surprised. You often don’t like reading books because you have to wear gloves to read them.” 

            “I have a weakness for Blake,” he says, and he glances over to his e-mails. There are three unread, one sent from Kade Purnell to the EBAU in its entirety. 

            “He says you had him look after your dogs.” 

            “You were out of town and he offered.” 

            “Do you like him, Will?” Alana asks, and he clicks on the e-mail so that he can avoid her eyes. He can taste the air, the sense of a potent jealousy and an uncomfortable and mildly unprofessional conversation. 

            “…I respect Dr. Lecter,” he says slowly. 

            “You’ve gotten coffee together.” 

            “I was told that I needed to socialize more.” 

            “With your psychiatrist?”

            “You’re my psychiatrist, and we’ve gotten coffee together,” Will points out. “Do the years mean that it’s different?”

            “Time makes it different, as we’ve known each other for years,” she points out. “I know that you don’t socialize much outside of work, so it caught me off guard to hear that.”

            “It’s just coffee,” he assures her, “we’re not golfing together.”

            The look she gives him is troublesome at best with the censure in it.

            “I just know that when you like something, you tend to get a little…”

            “What?” he asks sharply. “What do I get?”

            “Obsessive.”

            “Obsessive,” he repeats flatly.

            “I took a look at the tablet you’ve been borrowing from Beverly-”

            “-She must not use it a whole lot to not need it back yet-”

            “-and you had it pulled open to over twenty tabs of his articles,” she continues, talking over him.

            “…I’m allowed to read articles that interest me,” he says slowly. His gaze shifts from the e-mail from Purnell then back to Alana, and he sits back in his chair, letting it squeak loudly in the room. “Aren’t I?”

            “When you liked me-”

            “I already assured you, _years_ ago, that it was nothing. A mild interest because you’d seemed interesting at the time. I satiated my curiosity, and it was done.”

            “You satiated your curiosity by having agents from the EBAU follow me around in order to ensure that I remained safe,” she retorts. “Are you doing the same with Dr. Lecter?”

            “No! I was…going through a difficult time, and you know that. It’s not the same.”

            She tries a different tactic, and he can sense the shift of it, the frustration that that avenue was so quickly shut down.

            “You have a habit of creating these worlds within mere instances, Will, where lives and stories and people are lived out based off of a few interactions. It’s one of the catches of a Dreamer, and you have two other gifts that only add to that. I’m just worried that you’re doing the same with Dr. Lecter.”

            Will thinks of the two of them, huddled together and speaking quietly with one another, at ease and at peace with their place in the world. Had Dr. Lecter said something? Had it bothered him when he saw the articles, displayed so ridiculously for just anyone to realize that his interest was far beyond patient-therapist? His poker face was so well constructed that it was difficult to tell, a struggle to know just what he thought of Will.

            Perhaps _he_ sent Alana to Will, to have a buffer between the two of them.

            “…That was a long time ago,” Will says slowly, and he looks up to fix his stare at Alana’s nose. “It’s embarrassing and, quite frankly, frustrating that you feel the need to bring that up when all that I’m trying to do is truly and honestly help myself through therapy. Everyone here has harped on me to do it, to be part of it, and now that I am, you’re giving me a lecture? Just what do I have to make you happy, Dr. Bloom?

            “I’m reading books now, something I’ve avoided for a long time because the texture isn’t right in gloved hands. I’m socializing, reaching out when I’m struggling, and going to face down the fears of falling into Abigail Hobbs’ mind again. I’m working, and I don’t feel entirely too stressed about two cases rather than one. I’m having conversations that aren’t just about my mind and its gifts, and all that you can talk about when you sit down across from is now that I’m feeling better, you want to bring up all of the things of my past that went wrong.”

            She doesn’t have a quick answer to that, and he can smell her embarrassment like a bad perfume that permeates the air. She can’t maintain his almost-gaze, and she looks down, gripping her briefcase tightly, a grounding rod. It’s difficult for Alana to admit that she’s made a mistake.

            He can empathize with that, seeing as how her thought process isn’t wrong in the least.

            Doesn’t mean that he’s going to admit it, though.

            “I _am_ happy that this therapy seems to be working for you, Will,” she says at last. “Where we’ve only seen you in therapy with me, I suppose none of us really recognized the Will Graham that appears when the therapy is actually working.”

            The smile she gives him is sincere and mildly embarrassed.

            “I’ll communicate my thought processes more if that will help you. With Abigail Hobbs…it’s mentally helped me to help her. To see her as alive and here, and to validate her fears and trauma to help her overcome them. I think that’s helped more than a group session with other empaths where it becomes a humble-brag as to who endured the most mentally straining work recently.”

            She opens her mouth to protest that, but at his shit-eating grin, she stops and shakes her head, laughing a little.

            “Just keep me in the loop, Will,” she says at last, standing up. “Whatever Dr. Lecter is doing that’s having such an effect on you, I hope he keeps doing it.”

            She sees herself out, and Will is still smiling, up until the door closes.

            Then he looks to the E-mail from Kade Purnell to the entire EBAU, and his stomach drops.

**Due to a breach in coded information, all personnel are to change their passwords, effective immediately. Passwords must contain two uppercase letters, two numbers, two symbols, and no words.**

-

            That night, Will can’t get Alana’s words out of his head. He reasons that it makes sense for it to trouble him, seeing as how he isn’t doing as well as he claims, and Lecter’s therapy isn’t entirely working –

            -That doesn’t quite give him the right to break into his office at late hours, though.

            He’s wading into deep waters, though, and he has to know just who he can trust. Lecter says to trust him, to allow him to help Will through his troubles, but just what would he do were Will to come forward with everything going on within his mind? Just how would he ease Will’s burdens? A report to Director Hanson? A report to Jack?

            A report to Purnell?

            He’s stalling and he knows it, not opening those files he took. Stalling because he’s afraid of what he’ll find, the things he’ll see behind each brown folder. Perhaps if he doesn’t open it, it’s not quite the crime that it will be once it does? Perhaps he doesn’t want to quite admit that he’s afraid of what he’ll find, the Will Graham that he’ll see within each page, through the eyes of a person that can see nothing but his weaknesses?

            If he felt that he could at least trust _someone_ …

            He can trust Dolarhyde not to kill him. That’s somewhat of a relief, in truth.

            Picking locks is easy, and Will lets himself into the office with only the mildest sense of guilt. He closes and locks the door behind himself, and it’s with a slow, lazy turn that he stares about the muted, dark room. Without the lights and Lecter’s presence, it’s not as comfortable. It’s somehow bleak in the shadows, shrouded with the secrets that his patients dare to tell.

            He removes his gloves and walks around, getting a taste for the air. It smells like work, hunger, fears, and comfort. He avoids the chair that patients sit in, and he instead sits in the chair across from it, leaning back into it and letting out a loose, rumpled breath of air.

            Like before, he doesn’t fall into memories and thoughts. He can only gain impressions, emotions. Boredom, concern, interest, curiosity; Will sifts through the feelings of a person that is not altogether impressed with what was paraded before him. A patient (or many patients) left him displeased, a sense of boredom like there should be something _more_.

            He stands and moves about the room, fingertips gliding along the spines of books, gleaning off of them burning questions, nostalgic yearning, and the pang of an unanswered question. The impressions on the curved metal of the elk are old, old enough that he hasn’t touched it in sometime, although there is a feeling of quiet contemplation on the curtains.

            Will wanders over to the patient files tucked into a small, unobtrusive bookcase back behind the desk. He is not so much nosey about the others that Dr. Lecter sees –why care over their troubles when his own are so tumultuous? He glides fingers just a hair’s-breadth away from the books until he finds his own, and he sets it on the desk, palm pressed flat to it.

            Curiosity. Hunger. Worry. Amusement.

            Will’s teeth worry at his lip as he sits down at the desk, one palm pressed to wood that feels like artistic inspiration, the other pressed to a binding that doesn’t whisper of treacherous thoughts. He debates opening his file, reading everything within, but much like the one that sits in his briefcase, this one foretells a lot about him, first and foremost whether or not another person believes him to be entirely stable.

            The thought of Dr. Lecter thinking anything less of him than hope and respect is too much to bear.

            He can’t read it; instead, he thumbs through the pages, letting the smell of paper and book bindings fall over him. Fingertips glean fondness from among later pages, a burning sense of intrigue in the middle. He’s jolted by a mere whisper of attraction, something sensual that makes the back of his neck hot. He can only catch glimpses of words as he turns the pages too fast:

            _Stand, eyes, think, I, when, empath, to, potential, smile_

It’s the last one that makes him stop and look down just long enough that he can read the full sentence, curious.

            _That is the first time that I believe I’ve seen him honestly smile._

He traces over the word, and there it is again: a lurching tug on his heart, a murmur that there is something more there, something more than the titles and the jobs and the words. There is no hint of betrayal. There is no hint of duty over desire. There is an honest sense of want, of a hunger. Will can relate to that.

            He forces himself to put the book away, and he sits in Dr. Lecter’s desk chair for a long time, thinking.

            Alana may call it obsessive, but what would she know of it? She was not one that could hear and feel the impressions and thoughts of another, to fall into the minds around her unwillingly. To feel from Dr. Lecter the very things he himself sometimes feels…

            Maybe he could trust him after all.

-

            He manages to lose his tail at the farmer’s market.

            It’s not as easy as it sounds; Will has to duck about the roving masses of people, immersing himself without touching anyone. There is that fear that near-cripples him at first that he’ll be undone by the feelings of the crowd around him. It’s one of the last farmer’s markets now that it is officially Fall, and there is a rush to purchase as many rustic and handmade items before they have to wait the cold months until spring.

            He keeps his jacket buttoned and his collar turned up to avoid skin-to-skin contact, and he plunges in.

            Halfway through the crowd, when he glances back, he can spot someone scanning the crowd, far too much interest in the way they pause and study dark-haired men. He turns down a small avenue and stops just long enough to purchase a hat. For time’s sake, he uses cash, shoulders hunkered as though he were cold and not trying to hide.

            “Do you have one that no one has tried on?” he asks.

            “Sensitive skin?” the person asks kindly.

            “Very.”

            When he dons the cap, he gives them a brief smile and disappears back into the crowd.

            He doesn’t drive to see Reba; it’s only two miles away from the farmer’s market, and he wants to keep his tail detained there as long as possible. Instead, he walks with his head ducked, mindlessly thumbing through his phone. There isn’t much of interest there, but he hopes that if someone was able to make their way to his general direction, they’d pass over him as nothing more than a disenchanted member of the blue collar task force, tired and worn out from the long work week.

            He’s let into her work space, and Will stands in the dark for a long time, relishing in it. The hum of technology is muted, and he allows himself to enjoy the quiet, the dark. It’s a gamble to be here, should they manage to find him, but he needs a quiet space to work, a place he feels comfortable enough to think.

            “Agent Graham?”

            “I’m sorry for disturbing you, Miss McClane, but I…was wondering if I could utilize your work space.”

            “Trying to develop film?” she asks, and she doesn’t sound as though she minds his company in the least. He thinks of his love for her, his affection that was sincere and real and true, then has to carefully set it to the side; that is Dolarhyde’s love, not Will's.

            “Something like that.”

            “Well, this room stays dark, as you know, but you can use it for what you like. Can you see in the dark, Agent Graham?”

            “I can see a lot of things,” he assures her.

            “Well, alright then,” she says with a laugh. “Take two steps to your right, then up three. There’s a desk there for you.”

            “Thank you.” He follows her orders, then reaches into his pack and removes a pair of night vision goggles –they wouldn’t be missed from the weapons locker for awhile. They paint the room in wavering shades of green, and just across the way from him, Reba stands poised beside a large piece of machinery. Her eyes blink slowly, languidly in his direction.

            “Are you…getting close to finding Mr. D?” she asks.

            “Yes,” he replies. After a thought he adds, “And no.”

            “Do you think that he can be helped?”

            Will pulls out the files he’s been trying to find the time to read, and he stares down at them, focusing first on his own, then Dolarhyde’s.

            “That’s what I’m trying to find out,” he says, and with shaking hands he opens the file.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A bit late posting, but I just barely got back from PAX con this weekend in Seattle --it was such a blast! There was so much to do/see, and I got to meet up with a ton of old friends.
> 
> A special thanks to my patrons: Emily Elm, Matilda, Sylarana, Inky-Starlight, Duhaunt6, and Superlurk -you're the best!!
> 
> And thank you to everyone that has read/commented/shared this work. That honestly means so much to me.


	12. When Walls No Longer Stand

Chapter 12:

            _It wasn’t his own nightmares that woke him. Normally dreams gave way to darkness, a place in which his mind could rest because it was exhausted with conjuring fantasies from the people around him. If he worked enough in class, he could quiet his mind enough to sleep. If he excelled enough in his walls and his practice, there wasn’t anything left to ooze between the cracks to trouble him._

_No, no; someone else’s nightmares were bleeding in._

_They woke him with a startled whimper, hands coming down to cover the front of his boxers, fear making his voice small. His normal bunkmate was gone for the week, off visiting family that lived just an hour away. It cost money to have visits like that, money his own father didn’t have. In truth, he hadn’t seen him for years. Will stared, eyes wide and startled in the blackness of the dorm room, and another whimper managed to escape._

_On the other side of the wall, he heard the muffled sounds of someone crying._

_The walls in the dormitories weren’t entirely thick; government funding wasn’t going to be poured into ensuring that each room was separate and distinct from another. Will had woken before to the sound of sex, the sound of arguments and the sounds of an existential crisis unfolding from three rooms away. This, though; this reached deep inside of him, unfurled a flower of fear that he’d never been aware that he had, something that blossomed petals that wept unease and paranoia until he found himself with his back to the wall, arms wrapped tight around himself._

_His walls were down. The other boy was bleeding in._

_“Are…you alright?” he asked. His voice shook, weak, and he gritted his teeth. The crying warbled to a stop, sniffles punctuated by ragged breathing._

_“Yeah.”_

_“Were you having a nightmare?”_

_There was no answer to that, and Will pressed his ear to the wall, straining to catch a sound. Aware now that he’d been caught, the boy seemed to hold his breath, unable to let the slightest sound escape._

_“Are you new here?”_

_No answer to that, either. The urge to cover himself, to protect his genitalia was near-overwhelming when he took in a breath, and he pulled his knees taut to his chest as a tremor worked its way through._

_“No one is going to hurt you here,” he said through the wall. “I promise.”_

_There was another muffled sob, likely exhaled into the pillow._

_He wasn’t supposed to use his gifts for anything but school and training –the urge to do so gave him a stab of shame, that he was going to get caught and put in detention. When another sob made its way through the paper walls, though, he cringed into the sensations that washed over him like a wave, and he closed his eyes, reaching out past his walls to find the mind whose dreams were crashing all around them._

_Fear. God, there was so much fear._

_Will clapped his hands over his ears like he could deafen the sounds of sobbing that echoed inside of his mind. It was near-overwhelming as he felt for the Dreamer whose dreams had fallen away from him. It wasn’t hard to find the darkness that spread, a tar-like ichor whose thickness were fast enveloping the boy that cried and fought to be free. As his walls lay flat around him, he saw within his mind’s eye the struggle, the fear as someone reached, reached, reached and god why did loving her hurt so much?_

_Will knelt down beside the pit of tar and reached out, pressing his palms to it. It stank of abuse, of years of pain and love intertwining into an ooze that was unrecognizable. Hands clawed their way from it, even as the boy drowning within took a gulp and drowned._

_He Dreamed of steps, stairs that rose from the pit and lifted the boy from it with slow, easy assurance. He imagined boards cross-hatching over the pit so that no one could fall into it, barriers that isolated and locked away the nightmares that made him fear what the glint of scissors looked like in the muted moonlight. As the boy was lifted up, Will hurried up the steps and Dreamt railings, a protection so that no one would fall._

_The crying boy vomited sludge onto the marble floor, viscera hanging from trembling lips._

_Will could Dream that away, too._

_In their shared dream, he wrapped his arms around him and imagined them safe, protected from harm and fury alike. He imagined their peace, a serenity as all was made to fall quiet, calm in the silence. The boy didn’t hug him back, but he didn’t push him away, either. After a few moments passed, he let go._

_They didn’t speak for awhile, kneeling as they were in his fears and his painful memories. Will took hold of his shoulders, thinking on the calming things of sunlight on bright summer days and Full Harvest moons during autumn._

_He felt a trickle of calm, of comfort as he imagined a full moon above them, restoring them and invigorating them. The image above was fixating for the boy, and he gaped up at it with glazed, wild eyes. His breaths heaved, mouth gaping. His cleft palate somehow made it look wider. Will Dreamed away the bile that they sat in. He Dreamed them eons away from the pit below._

_In their shared dream, he wrapped his arms around him and imagined them safe, protected from harm and fury alike. He imagined their peace, a serenity as all was made to fall quiet, calm in the silence. The boy didn’t hug him back, but he didn’t push him away, either. After a few moments passed, he let go._

_“They’re just dreams,” Will assured him, thinking of his nightmares. “They can’t hurt you.”_

_“The best dreams can,” the boy murmured. His voice was ragged from his crying. “The best Dreamers know how to make the dreams so real they hurt.”_

_“Did that happen to you?” Will couldn’t help but ask. “Did someone Dream the pain?”_

_“Yes.”_

_“Are they still here?” Will wondered. He stomped down his own trickle of fear._

_“No,” the boy assured him, and wide eyes looked from the moon in order to pierce Will with his glazed stare. “No. I Dreamed that they died, then they did.”_

_Will was so startled by that admission that he was back in his room with his walls up around him before he could think to try and understand further, to confirm whether or not that’s what he actually means when he said that he dreamt their death._

_His eyes, honest and forgiving, had pierced through Will, branded him with something._

_“Are you still there?” the boy asked softly through the wall._

_“Yeah.”_

_“…Good,” he said, and Will heard the creak of the mattress, a soft thud as the boy leaned against the wall between them and rested his head against it. “Good.”_

_Will had nothing to say to that. He thought to ask further, but the admission given in of itself was so staggering, so personal that to beg for more felt sordid. His guilt churned, but he set it aside._

_“Thank you,” the boy murmured into the space between them, so quiet he barely caught it._

_Will turned his head, ear pressed to the wall, and they slept like that for the rest of the night._

_The next morning, he went to the dorm room next to his, but there was no one there. He thought to maybe tell his teachers or the agents about the boy with the dreams and the scissors, but he didn’t want to concern anyone. It was clear he’d come from a place where people weaponized their gifts and used them against innocents –one of the Academy’s worst fears about the cruelty that empaths could have if they’re not careful. If he was new, he would learn how to control himself, how to overcome his traumas._

_When asked if he’d had a pleasant night’s sleep, Will said yes. Yes, he did._

_-_

            Dolarhyde’s file is thick.

            Will turns over early pages, his Marine Corp background before he went into the FBI. His tumultuous past regarding the constant shift between grandmother, mother, foster care, grandmother, then foster care again is jarring in the midst of medals, awards, and ribbons for his hard work and service in the military. His walls were strong, a Staff Sergeant noted in a report.

            _He found the intel that no one else could_.

            His progress through the FBI is the smoothest Will has ever seen –no hiccups, no lapses in behavior or in his abilities. He’s quiet, compliant, and willing to work.

            After, Purnell snaps him up, and that’s when things become interesting.

            _His intel is thorough –he caught the potential RA before the EBAU had to step in. If you keep him focused, he knows what he’s doing._

“Focused,” Will murmurs, and he studies the date. Years prior. When everything tasted sweet and full of hope, full of promise for this job where he could utilize his skills and keep the public safe.

            _Six-month evaluation clean, mentions of his childhood but nothing concrete and clear. Just as close-lipped about it as he was at the academy._

There, a small print out contains his admission to the academy as a teen, his quiet mannerisms as he refused to discuss just what he’d come from that made him wake in the night with a wet bed and terrors.

            _He missed intel on the Keller case, expressed regret. Mentions of Graham being able to find them before people were hurt. Requested to speak with Graham about the mannerisms of the RA when he was brought in –request denied._

Will frowned over that, his wanting to speak to him about Keller –an E-1 that was planning on setting off a bomb at the Pentagon.

            _Six month evaluation clean._

_Six month evaluation clean._

_Six month evaluation clean._

He skims through that, looking for any other mention of his name or anything remotely suspicious. It isn’t until early 2017 that he finds something of note, something that makes him pause with his breath bubbling in the back of his throat.

            _Request to see therapist about loss of time._

Will rereads that several times, his breath catching. Loss of time. Time lapsing, slipping through fingers, falling to the floor where he picks it up and can’t recall quite where he left off.

            _He said he felt that time was slipping out of his hands,_ Reba had said.

_Psychiatric Evaluation: Francis Dolarhyde_

_June 6 th, 2017_

_Doctor: Hawthorne_

_Patient exhibits lapses of time, waking in his bed with no memory of leaving work. Lack of spacial awareness at times, prone to quiet moments of reflection rather than speaking. Fear of doing job poorly, feelings of inadequacy. When speaking a hand lifts to cover the mouth._

_He’s becoming suspicious. He dreams of something called a Red Dragon._

            Will pauses over that, studying the capitalization of it. There’s a tab at the top of the page, followed by another tab of the same yellow color farther back. He turns to that page, intrigued.

            _Red Dragon:_

            _Agent Yan –neutralized_

_Agent Mathers –neutralized_

_Agent Thompson –neutralized_

_Agent Nyong –neutralized_

_Agent Smith –neutralized_

_Agent King –detained_

Beside Agent King’s name, there is a note that someone put, almost as an afterthought: _Was able to evade Red Dragon and managed to reach out to police department to aid. Brought in by EBAU, currently residing at BSHCI._

The word ‘neutralized’ resonates with him, as it’s a specific way of referring to a potential threat. The difference between neutralized and detained is a gaping chasm, one referring to someone being apprehended versus someone becoming something neither positive nor negative –neutral.

            Dead.

            Will only vaguely recalls these agents names, as they were not people he hunted down but people Dolarhyde watched –Red Dragon neutralized? People within the FBI or other government positions, people that were observed and found wanting.

            _Agent Hobbs –neutralized via Agent Graham, E-3 –EBAU_

He goes to that tab at the mention of Hobbs, his spit turning rusty at the confirmation that neutralize means to end, to finish.

            _Agent Hobbs observed. At the abduction of Gertrude, the first victim, Red Dragon was to neutralize after report. Instead, allowed RA to escape with victim. Case moved from EI to EBAU under Director Crawford and Graham –E-3._

_Six month evaluation clean._

Clean? With a confirmed loss of time, he was still found somehow clean? Will turns back to the pages referring to Dr. Hawthorne’s reports on Agent Dolarhyde, moving on to the next session that was requested by Francis.

            _Paranoia, questions regarding whether or not he watches or if he is the one watched. When asked on the particulars regarding the Hobbs investigation, an expression of fear that if he does not catch the next one fast enough, he will be neutralized. Agent Dolarhyde produced a notebook from cover to cover depicting every event and action that he can recall, as well as the time lapses in between where time was lost. Requests hypnosis, or anti-psychotics._

There is a note attached to that, written in what Will recognizes as Purnell’s handwriting:

            _Have Mr. Perkins release the proper medication._

_Agent Graham –observed_

He stills at his name, fingers passing over it so that he can better study and understand. He follows those tabs to Dolarhyde’s observations, written in a perfect and elegant penmanship.

            _Evening: Dogs, dinner, reading, tinkering, sleep. Clockwork._

_Morning: Breakfast, dogs, shower, dogs, work._

_Work: Focused. Goes about business with a sense of urgency. Purposeful._

_Social: Non-existent._

_Mind: Cracked but resilient. Six month evaluation prior to Hobbs clean. Cracks began after Hobbs case began, attributed to pressure and matter of work. Request for lower hours or lighter load._

_Mind: Cracks. Sometimes he dreams that his daughter will leave._

_Target displays a quiet contemplation and pain after death of Hobbs. Request rest rather than counseling. He is tired. So tired._

_Time lost. Paperwork was filed on man I hadn’t reported on. Suggest paid leave for Graham before returning. Cracked but still good._

_These pills aren’t working._

            Beside that, there is a stamp with a spongy and speckled ‘Request Denied’ beside Will’s requested yet unrequested paid time off. Dolarhyde had requested that he had time to rest before he returned to work? Why hadn’t Jack suggested it to Will? He turns another page, heart pounding.

            _Directive filed to retire Graham after next six month evaluation –Director Purnell_

There is another note, and he flips the pages to a blue tab. Written in Dolarhyde’s careful hand, there is a letter.

_Director Purnell,_

_I write this because there are people filed under my observation list that I see have been neutralized. When I looked into the matter of Agent Mathers, I’d documented that he should be retired. Public record displays him as such, but private documents when I was filing my work show him as otherwise. Are my observations being trumped by something that I’m unaware of?_

_I’m still experiencing time lapses. This medication isn’t working. I’d like to request either vacation or sick leave until I can reassemble myself._

_-Agent Dolarhyde_

_Director Purnell,_

_Someone attempted to neutralize me last night._

_I don’t recall the situation in its entirety. I recall writing ‘I am being watched,’ but the next thing that I recall is waking up to blood on my hands and one of your men in my trunk. I have been trying to get help for my time lapses, but when I was attempting to research just what was happening to the targets that I filed under ‘retired’ I found a separate file that you have me under._

_Red Dragon? Is that who you refer to when I cannot find myself?_

_He killed your man, Director Purnell. Whatever you’ve been manifesting and encouraging while I tried to fix it, he is much displeased with what you’ve done. In my dreams, he comes into my head and whispers that I should kill you._

_I think I’ll let him._

_-Agent Dolarhyde_

            Will rereads those letters once, twice; on the third time, he leans back and lets out a slow, pained breath, tugging the gloves from his hands because he knows, he _knows_ and it’s suddenly making so much sense as to why Francis Dolarhyde was placing mirrors in the eyes of these people –

            He just wanted someone to _see_.

            _Can you see?_

He grasps the paper with his bare hands, his breath catching as he’s hit with a shock of fury, a shock of betrayal, and he’s falling into the memory before he can quite prepare himself, before he can peek through the windows like Abigail begged him to.

            _The man is silent._

_I pace, steps graceful and lithe, although my hands clench so tightly I can scarce contain them. I both am and am not, both the victim and the aggressor. I snarl, smoke billowing from nostrils like the Dragon, powerful and all things destruction. In my Dreams, I see the smoke and know that it is true._

_“She thinks to end me?” I hiss, and I round upon the man. He is glued to the chair. To remove him would be agony for him, and the thought brings me joy, dark and all-encompassing as it burns through my skin, pushing farther with each beat of my heart. “She would end me when I have quieted those that would disobey?”_

_“Agent Dolarhyde, you have exhibited RA tendencies. Director Purnell is merely-”_

_“I KILLED FOR HER,” I roar, and I’m upon him, knees digging into his thighs. Spit flies from my mouth, and he cringes against the sound around him._

_“You killed for yourself. She merely encouraged it,” the man manages._

_“She sends a neurotypical to end me? After all that I have done?” I pace again, and I imagine my tail, sleek and long and powerful trailing after me. It is beautiful, scaled and deadly; everything that I am and could be._

_“You’re a danger to your own organization, Agent-”_

_“Have you seen the power of an empath before?” I interrupt, and I turn about, staring at him. His voice withers, his eyes widening. “Surely you have not, try as your kind does to stifle us. We who struggle beneath the boot of your fears, taught that our gifts are to be despised, loathed. You have grown up in a world where we are whispers, servants to the government that would break us._

_“Francis believes that to retire, we allow them to go to their homes and their pensions and their happy ending. You and I know the truth; a dead empath is a neutralized threat. So comfortable were you all, banking on my compliance because I was allowed to shed blood and Make; to cross me is to fail. You will tremble in my power, for do you not see that only through your Change can I fully Become?”_

_“Agent-”_

_“Do you not wish to see the might of an empath that knows their worth?” I ask. I do not wait for an answer though, moot as it is. I will show him. “I have seen it. I am that power. That fury. You will tremble before me, knees to the ground as you quiver and beg, prostrating yourself before your God. I will show you.”_

_I will show them all._

_I am grabbing his face before he can respond, before he can process just what is going to happen to him. Minds like his are weak, vulnerable to my power and capability, and I’m inside of his mind before he can think to defend himself, his eyes my own as I delve deep, deep, deep into the waterfall of thoughts, fears, and dreams._

_Oh, god; the dreams._

_I Create them, sick as they are. Rivers of blood that he drowns in, where he wakes trembling and paralyzed as a crone leers over him to consume –his fears are there, each and everyone, and as I crash through his psyche I Dream them all against him, breaking what paltry resistances exist because so foolish were they do bank so much on our fear of our own power that they never thought to try and control their own._

_The walls do not come for me. To consume them, I Become them, and as I step away, I carry his fears as my own. He is comatose, awake but never again to Be, unaware and never again to Live._

_Which is just as well, Director Purnell, as you will learn when you force a Feeler to glean from this paper this scene: he won’t live long enough to truly suffer that fate._

_I’m coming for you. You and every other that dared to cross Francis and The Great Red Dragon._

Will is only able to come back to himself because of the sharp, piercing ring of the phone back in reality. He drops the paper and has to rub his palms into his jeans, shaking, and once he has sufficiently wiped them down he puts his gloves back on. He’ll need to wash his hands soon.

            He’s sweating, and he wipes at his hairline as the phone rings once more and Reba answers it, voice hushed as she tries to let him keep to his work.

            His work. Dolarhyde.

            “No…no, no one is in here,” Reba says, politely confused. “You know that I work well alone.”

            He’s running out of time. Will hears the mild evasion in her voice, and he shoves Dolarhyde’s file aside so that he can look at his own, his heart beating both too slow and far too fast as it struggles to be both Dolarhyde and him, both excited and utterly, utterly afraid. He licks his lips, unable to quite remove the taste of what someone else’s mouth feels like when he’s ripping it off of their face. The pride. The joy.

            God, the joy.

            “No, Mr. D hasn’t been here for work in…well, I’d say a little over a month?” There is a laugh. “Why are you asking all of these questions?”

            His file is much thinner, and when he opens it, there is a pointed, pained silence as Reba falls quiet and his ears begin to roar.

            The first page, written in a familiar, precise handwriting, is all that Will needs to fully understand just what he’s going up against. He wonders what he’ll take away from it, should he press his fingers to these words instead:

            **They know.**

“I see. Well, I’ll keep a look out.” There’s another laugh. “Yes, okay. Thank you.”

            There is a click as Reba hangs up, and Will turns the page in the file, palms sweaty as he stares at a blank page, then another blank page, then another. Dolarhyde had somehow gotten to his files.

            They knew.

            “Agent Graham?” Reba prompts tentatively. He looks up, the wavering green of the lenses giving her an ethereal look as she gazes in his direction, mouth pursed with unsaid words.

            “Yes?” he asks hoarsely. He clears his throat –it sounded far too much like Dolarhyde.

            “The front desk men…they say there are some agents looking around the place.” She shifts, hesitating with her next words. “Are you…are you in some kind of trouble? Is everything alright?”

            “They know,” he says, and it only takes a moment for Reba to catch on. Her face seems to fall in on itself, and she’s sinking into the chair next to her so that she can collect herself, hands pressed to lips that no doubt wish to cry.

            “What are you going to do?” she asks, muffled. “For him? For…for you?”

            It’s a good question, and he packs up the files, tucking them into his bag. There aren’t a lot of options for him at this moment, stomach close to mutiny and lips savoring the taste of another person’s blood. One thing is for certain, though:

            Despite what all has happened, Dolarhyde is innocent.

            Will is innocent.

            That certainly didn’t mean they were safe, though.

            _Can you see?_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A special thanks to my patrons: Emily Elm, Sylarana, Matilda, Inky-Starlight, Duhaunt6, and Superlurk! <3
> 
> And thank you to all of your continued support for this work! With back to school/fall rush at work, I'm glad that I still have time for writing. :)


	13. When Silence Ensnares

Chapter 13:

            He finds the first man searching the bathroom stalls.

            Will isn’t quite sure what he’s going to do until he sees the gun drawn, subtle but still present in the man’s right hand. It lingers just at his side, and when the man turns away from the stall and comes face to face with Will, he reaches up with ungloved hands and claps them over the agent’s ears, staring deep into his eyes.

            Falling in. Forever, Will would find himself falling in.

            _Neutralize, cover, recover, report, neutralize, cover –_

_No, no, no_!

            There is the sensation of resistance, but there is enough of Dolarhyde still swimming in Will’s veins that it’s paltry at best. He sweeps it aside with the sensation of fear, of running and running and running and _there is no escape, Agent Jackson._

“P-please,” the man manages to stutter, and his eyes roll into the back of his head.

            “Forget me,” Will urges quietly, and his voice isn’t quite his own. “Forget me. You were never here. You were never here, and you know nothing of Will Graham.”

            _My family, god, my family,_

_No, no! No, if he knows my family, he’ll kill them, he’ll put mirrors over them, too –no, no, no, no…_

“Forget me and I won’t harm your family,” Will urges, and he imagines hands clawing into the man’s mind, swiping away any trace. It feels forceful, dirty, and when the man slumps against him, unconscious, Will eases him onto the toilet and lets his head loll to the side to rest against the partition.

            “Forget,” he says again, and it’s as much a genuine plea as a demand.

            He takes the gun from him and disassembles it, shoving the pieces into his pack. The suppressor on the end confirms what the man had come there to do.

            He feels dirty leaving him there but does it anyway, frantically tugging his gloves on before he starts crying over the potential loss of his family that in reality doesn’t exist.

            The second agent he does not find, but that’s alright. He’s in a taxi headed towards Wolf Trap before he knows quite what he’s going to do –run? Was he considered an RA now, or was he merely someone under investigation, someone they weren’t quite finished with yet, so they would keep him around?

            The files burn and turn his bag to ash. He holds it tightly to his chest and imagines what was inside of his own that was so abhorrent Dolarhyde didn’t want him to see.

            “Everything okay?” the man driving the taxi asks congenially. He glances up in the rearview mirror to give Will a brief smile.

            Will shakily readjusts his glasses and manages a nod.

            “I think I’m coming down with something. Flu, maybe just a cold…something.”

            “It’s that time of season,” the man says, accepting his excuse for the tremors and shifty eyes. “Half the team is down for the count on account of it. Colds, mostly.”

            Will nods and looks out of the window where the sky is grey, bleak and uninviting. Cold.

            “It’ll snow soon,” the man continues when Will says nothing more. “Snow…it’ll be a bitch to drive through.”

            “Do you have winter tires?” Will asks.

            “Oh yeah, big time,” the man promises. “I take good care of this here car.”

            He pats the leather arm rest beside him, and Will manages an agreeable smile, although it can’t stay. His thoughts are with Dolarhyde, with a man who knew from the core of his heart that something was wrong but had no way to fix it.

            The smell of betrayal that Will found at the crime scenes make so much more sense, now that he knows just what Dolarhyde had been begging these men to do.

            He just wanted someone to _see_.

            “Up to the house?” the man asks.

            Will looks up from the faded spot of material near the knee of his slacks, and he shakes his head. “No, no…just here is fine. By the mailbox.”

            He fishes out cash and passes it over. On seeing his gloves, the man lets out a disturbed noise.

            “Christ, if you were cold, you could have asked for heat!” He laughs and looks to Will, eyes bright. “I’d have turned the heat on for you!”

            Will manages something much like a grimace and he shakes his head, climbing out from the car.

            “It’s fine,” he assures the man. “I didn’t want to spread germs.”

            The man is still laughing and shaking his head, even as he pulls away.

            Will then heads deep into the forest to take the long way around to the house.

            It’s a brisk walk, and it helps with the pounding in his head that urges him to run and run and run and run. He forces himself to keep the steady and even pace of a person that knows where they’re going and what they’re going to do once they get there –he doesn’t, but he can’t afford to panic now. He thinks of Dolarhyde who has been calm despite the fracturing of his mind. He thinks of the man he’d just left unconscious in a bathroom stall. He’s taken enough steps that he can’t afford to panic. He has to _act_.

            Just what he’s supposed to do, though, Will isn’t sure.

            He comes up on the back of the house, and when he steps onto the property he is suddenly aware that he’s not alone. Will’s arms tingle, and the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end, so much so that he lets out a quiet hiss of breath and sets his bag down in one of the browning and sleeping bushes nearby. He slinks through the grass, then presses himself to the side of the house where he slides with utmost care, careful of the exposed skin on his face and neck. He feels the sensation of birds in flight, of a bug trundling along. When he reaches the edge, he peeks around the corner.

            Hannibal Lecter stands on the porch, looking mildly perplexed.

            He’s dressed far more to the cold than Will is. Fall is bitter in Wolf Trap, out in the open forest with nothing to warm it. His scarf is snug, and the hat on his head looks to be wool-lined and soft. Will watches him as he paces along the porch just long enough to turn about so that he can once more knock on the door with two firm, solid thuds.

            “Dr. Lecter?”

            He’s speaking without entirely intending to, stepping around the side of the house before his mind can quite decide if that’s a good move to make. Hannibal turns, and he smiles politely, albeit confused as he takes in Will’s pink cheeks and the faint sheen of sweat he no doubt has at his hairline. It’d been a brisk pace through the forest, after all.

            “Agent Graham,” he greets, and he steps off of the porch to shake Will’s gloved hand. “I called your cell phone, but you must have been out of service.”

            “…Fishing,” Will explains, and he gestures back towards the woods.

            “Is the fishing particularly good at this time of year?”

            “Yes…if you know the right bait.”

            Dr. Lecter would be the perfect bait, if they knew how to use him. Had the FBI already called him? The EBAU? Purnell? Will studies his amiable countenance –as ungiving and uninformative as every other time he’s looked at him to try and see. He thinks of the way that he’d written ‘smile’ though –pleasantly surprised and warm. Will sucks in a breath, hollowing out his cheeks, before he exhales raggedly and gestures off towards the door.

            “…Come on in,” he says, and he’s leading Hannibal into the house before he can change his mind.

            Hannibal is quiet, and the dogs greet him as warmly as they do Will. Their snuffling and whuffing noses prod and poke for treats that the good doctor cannot give, and Will feeds them, his gloves still firmly on.

            “Is this a bad time?” Hannibal asks.

            “No, why?”

            “You were fishing but returned with no equipment, and although I am no expert on what one wears for the task, you’re dressed for office work rather than legwork.” Rather than sounding amused at his deductions, Hannibal sounds grave. “Are you alright?”

            Will opens his mouth to reply with something inane and rather circular, but at the sound of wheels on gravel, his throat tightens and he loses all ability to speak. He glances from Hannibal to the door, then strides down the hall towards the master bedroom to get a better angle of the driveway without being seen because if he’s seen, then they’ll know, they’ll know, they’ll _know_.

            Hannibal’s car is out in the driveway, though; they’ll know, no matter what.

            _They know._

“Agent Graham-”

            “Why are you here?” Will demands, and he peeks through the window and watches an agent get out of a sleek, non-descript car. It’s their purposefully common-looking clothing that tips him off, and he glances back to Hannibal with a scowl. “Why did you come here?”

            Hannibal pauses, guarded. Whatever he sees on Will’s face, he doesn’t quite like. “I thought to finally return your key to you, but if this is a bad time, I-” 

            Will doesn’t wait for him to give options in regards to timing and the illness of it. He grabs Hannibal by his lapels and shoves him into the wardrobe, climbing in after him and shutting the doors behind them. It’s cramped, and in the tight space he is more than aware of every inch of Hannibal that is pressed against him, the cologne that he wears with the most careful of application. Their breathing intermingles, and when Will turns his head from the now secure doors, they are almost nose-to-nose. 

            “Will, what is happening?” Hannibal murmurs, and it sounds entirely too calm. Despite being roughly handled, he doesn’t fight back and for that Will is eternally grateful.

            “Shh,” Will urges, and his ears strain to catch the slightest of sounds.  

            Just down the hall, he hears the muted click of the latch on the door catching. Someone else is in the house. His dogs let out wild, whooping barks that are slowly quieted as the man –hopefully –merely placates them with petting rather than a blade or a silenced gun.

            “Will-” 

            “Please, Hannibal,” he hisses, and he dips his head to press it into the curve of his shoulder, willing him to  _understand_. “Please…be quiet.” 

            Hannibal’s heartbeat is remarkably calm against his cheek. In contrast, his own thunders in his ears, hollow and frantic and terrified. Alone, he is sure that he can slip away, lose his tail in the woods back behind his house before he backtracks and hits the road with his truck. With someone else, though, someone not necessarily akin to violence, he isn’t as confident that he can get away and ensure that no one gets hurt.

            His short, unsteady breathing is halted when Hannibal shifts and wraps his arms around him, pulling him against his chest. 

            No part of his skin touches Hannibal’s; rather than finding himself sinking into the cells of another person, Will is instead bombarded with a sense of security, the wool of Hannibal’s coat scratchy against his cheek, the spread of his palm flat against his back. He can’t think of the last time he’s ever been hugged -surely it was Molly so long ago because no one else would have ever had the need -and rather than tensing and fighting against it, he’s flooded with a sensation of sinking into it, a need that twists in his gut and spreads with every heartbeat.  

            Will shifts and slides his arms around him, clinging to him tightly as he burrows his nose into the collar of his shirt and tries to  _breathe_. It’s intimate like this, in the dark with only the two of them and the silent fear. In the dark he can’t  _see_ , but in the dark he is able to feel, and the fact that he can only feel his own heart beating and his own emotions untangling and unfurling inside is a marvelous sort of thing, heady when coupled with death that lurks just outside of his door. 

            If the man with the purposefully too-normal outfit is here to kill him, this may just be a decent sort of way to die, Will thinks. 

            Hannibal’s hand passes along the back of his head, through his curls to glide along his back. Will closes his eyes tight when he hears the squeak of an unhappy floorboard, the whisper of a coat brushing against the drywall in the hall. He tries to match his breathing to Hannibal’s to still his heart that screams just loud enough he fears it will give them away. When the door to the bedroom creaks open, he stops breathing entirely. 

            Hannibal’s hands, blessedly gloved, cradle his cheeks and lift his face. In the shadows and darkness of the wardrobe, he can’t see details, but he can trace the curve of his face with his eyes, the dips of his cheeks that darken where they sink in ever-so-slightly. He holds his breath as he senses the man moving about the room, searching, and he stares at the space he knows Hannibal’s eyes would be, if he could only see. 

            Ten seconds pass; then twenty. Hannibal’s thumbs brush along his cheeks, and as the man departs, Will exhales slowly and leans into him, trembling. He can feel Hannibal’s breath catching in his throat, and he thinks of the things he’d felt when he dared to put his fingers to the pages of his patient notes. Although intimate for Will, he’s certain that it’s grossly intimate for Hannibal, too.

            There is the sound a few minutes later of a car starting and working its way down the gravel drive, and it is only then that Will is able to relax. 

            “Will,” Hannibal murmurs, and Will lets go of him, flexing fingers cramped from holding on so tightly. “What’s going on?” 

            “…I need your help, Dr. Lecter,” Will replies, and he despises how his voice cracks. “…I really need your help.” 

- 

            They make their way to Hannibal’s home, but only after Will has done a roundabout check of the property to ensure that no one else is snooping about. As an afterthought, he skims over the doorway leading from the kitchen and finds the bug, crushing it under his foot.

            “How did you know?” Hannibal asks him, poised in the doorway of the house.

            “It covers all main entrances and exits,” Will replies, and he locks the dogs in when they go.

            In the car, Hannibal glances over at him several times. Will tries to unstick the words from his throat, pressed low in the passenger seat, but they refuse to untangle so that he can make sense of them. He swallows spit down several times, and he fiddles with a loose thread on the arm of his suitcoat.

            Somewhere along the way, Hannibal takes his hand at a red light. They both wear gloves, and Will stares at his black gloves in contrast to Hannibal’s doeskin pair, thin enough to be useful but warm enough to stave off the cold.

            He doesn’t remove his hand.

            The house is nice; something suited to Hannibal Lecter’s eclectic and grand nature. White shutters stand in stark contrast to granite stonework, and the wrought-iron gate at the front is key-coded. Will follow him in, head ducked and eyes searching for any sign of a tail.

            He wonders how the man in the bathroom stall is doing.

            The fireplace is fired up once he’s led to the study, and Will is deposited in front of it without resistance. He stands there, staring at the colors that curl and snap around one another, and he soaks in the warmth as Hannibal busies himself with mindless organizing and tidying. His study is much like his office –warm colors mixed with harsh corners and furniture. Tossed on one of the leather chairs, Will’s bag holds a thousand secrets and a thousand lies. He clears his throat and gags a little at the thought.

            “In that bag is my career,” Will says at length. The soft, muffled noise of tidying stills.

            “Did you look at your file?”

            “I would have, had Agent Dolarhyde not taken the pages out.”

            “You have Agent Dolarhyde’s file, then.”

            “Yes.”

            Silence, and Will slowly turns from the fire in order to gauge Hannibal’s reaction. He’s calm in the face of such an admission, as though this were any other conversation in his office.

            “What did you learn?” he asks, and he sits down in the chair across from Will’s bag. It’s not like the office with two chairs facing off from one another, but instead angled close together with an end table between them.

            “Were you aware of much of the empath program in the FBI?” Will asks instead.

            “I was aware of their capacity for strict and somewhat harsh protocol, but that is something I learned by watching you,” Hannibal replies. The firelight flickers and casts malevolent shadows on his face, and his eyes remained fixed on Will. “What did you learn?” he repeats.

            “Were you aware that the empath program can forcibly retire people before they can become an RA?”

            “You’d said as much.”

            “What did you know about me beforehand, Dr. Lecter?” Will asks. His voice comes out as hard and unyielding as stone. “What did they tell you?”

            “I was aware that they’d discussed a potential to retire you,” Hannibal says. “They said that they didn’t want to push you past what you could handle and create an RA, however; they were aware of just how much you love the EBAU and your work, as hard and damaging as it is to you because you like the idea of helping people at its core. It’s a pure, kind ideology.

            “My job was to determine your mental state to see if it was merely stress or if there was something more. In our conversations, you showed a great deal of stress and mental strain, although there is a resilience to you, Agent Graham, that refuses to be beaten. You rise to every occasion. Your behavior wasn’t becoming unstable. You merely showed a need to properly channel your grief and trauma.”

            “Agent Francis Dolarhyde was also supposed to determine my mental state,” Will reveals. “Before you.”

            “And what did he find?” Hannibal’s eyes flick over to the bag before they drift back to Will, head cocked to the side.

            “He said that I just needed a break. That I just needed some time to get my head on right.” Will bares his teeth, and the twisting and gnawing in his gut worsens. “Their words to him, after he informed them that I was still fit to work, was that I was to be retired, despite his observations.”

            “They thought otherwise?”

            “Do you know that in Dolarhyde’s files, to be retired means to be put down?” Will demands, and he stares into Hannibal’s eyes at the silence that follows, willing the truth to show in his eyes, on the hollows of his cheeks. He can see nothing, though, and _God_ for the first time in forever he wished ardently that he could see.

            Hannibal stands up, and he crosses the distance between them slowly. When he gets close enough, Will starts to take a step back, but Hannibal stops him by reaching out and taking his hand, stilling his escape. The look that he gives Will sears, burns deep, before he glances down and carefully, skillfully removes his glove from his left hand, setting it on the mantle of the fireplace.

            Then he deliberately presses his palm to Will’s.

            It’s faint, like the frantic beating from the heart of a wild animal. Small rushes of emotion, ideas, thoughts, and at its core there is a reverent, warm sort of care that wonders at Will’s ability to dream, to Become. Will feels shock, surprise, unease, and a protective, vindicated fury, coupled with a warm glow of affection, something surprising even to its owner.

            He stares down at their hands, his own chapped and scarred and ugly, compared to Hannibal’s warm and smooth skin, and he has to swallow down the noise of surprise at the undertones that he picks up, an honest sense of want that burrows deep and springs forth orchids across his eyelids as he blinks.

            “I have only wanted to help you, Will,” Hannibal says quietly. “I have been curious, yes, and I have shared certain observations with your boss and the EBAU, as was my job, however; I have only wanted to help you.”

            Will shifts his hand and presses his fingertips to Hannibal’s pulse, just at the dip in his wrist. He swallows heavily and nods, dipping his head down to better avoid Hannibal’s eyes.

            “I believe you.”

            “Then let me help you,” Hannibal urges quietly. “I can’t force you. You have to let me.”

            “They’re going to kill me,” Will whispers, and he swallows down a persistent noise of despair. “They’re going to kill me for what I’ve discovered.”

            Hannibal lets go of Will’s hand and allows him to glove it. He steps back to give him space, and Will swallows down short gulps of air as he looks back to the fire and watches it devour the logs with non-malicious intent.

            “Have you weaponized your gifts, Will?”

            “No,” he snaps too quickly, and he thinks of the man that he quieted into a still, sweet sleep. “I haven’t hurt anyone, I just…the EBAU is asking me to hunt an RA that only became an RA because he was lied to. He told them that something was wrong, and their answer to it was to lie to him and then try and kill him. And now that I’m becoming aware of that, they want to kill me.”

            “What do they gain by killing you rather than correct you?” Hannibal wonders. “You’re the only known E-3 that’s not institutionalized. You are an asset, not a hindrance to their work.”

            Will knows this, having ruminated on it during his sleepless nights when tossing and turning gave way to pacing. “They’re afraid that if I decide that they don’t have my best interests at heart, I’ll weaponize my gifts and go off of the grid. They’d rather me dead than an RA.”

            “Do you think them so heartless?”

            Will thinks of Jack staring him in the eyes and forcing himself to lie, and he nods, teeth frantically chewing over his lips, peeling skin.

            “Yes.”

            “Then I’ll help you,” Hannibal decides, and Will bows his head down in sweet, pained relief.

-

            The Feeler is uncomfortable, and so is Jack.

            “Nothing?” Jack asks.

            “Nothing,” the Feeler affirms.

            The agent in the stall of Gateway Corp’s bathroom sits blankly in the backseat of Jack’s car. He watches the man gaze about with child-like wonder, and he wishes in that moment that he could pour himself a stiff, strong drink.

            “It’s like…he wiped him clean,” the Feeler continues, and Jack lets out a grunt, a mix between a groan of annoyance and a whine of unease. “There’s no memory, no…sensation. Agent Jackson doesn’t even know his name.”

            “It’s Dolarhyde?” Jack asks.

            “That’s what it feels like, but it’s…different. I worked with Agent Dolarhyde a few times, Agent Crawford, and this isn’t quite…him. It feels like him, but…”

            Agent Gee pauses and tries to find the words to describe it. Jack lets him, and he watches the paramedic track Agent Jackson’s response time with his vision, gaze tracking the back and forth motion of a small flashlight.

            “Honestly, I think Agent Graham would know better. You’ve had him tracking Dolarhyde, right, sir? He’d probably gain a better insight to this.”

            Jack grunts again and nods, rubbing the furrow between his brows. This shit was getting out of hand. It’d been getting out of hand for awhile now, but this…

            “I’ll give him a call,” he says at last, and he smiles at Agent Gee. “Thank you.”

            The Feeler gloves his hands and walks away to wait for any other command. In reality, Jack envies him, that he’s so low in rank that he doesn’t have to worry about things like RA’s and tracking and Will Graham of all people…

            He calls Director Purnell, and it goes to voicemail. God damn, he’s getting tired of leaving so many voicemails. He makes his way around the few cars that they have parked near the back of the lot, out of sight of cameras.

            “Director Purnell, this is Jack. We’re trying to be discreet here, but someone at the film developing agency found Agent Jackson unconscious in a bathroom stall. He’d been tracking Graham, and it looks like Dolarhyde got a hold of him.

            “My problem here, Kade, is that last we thought, Dolarhyde was after Slowinski. So that tells me either he’s changing course because Graham was tracking him, leaving Slowinski out of danger, or it wasn’t Dolarhyde that got to Agent Jackson. Your guy doesn’t even know his own name. You hear me, Kade? Jackson can’t even remember his name. Kade. You know your fucking name, don’t you? You guy doesn’t, and you’d sent him after Graham to see what he was doing here.

            “So the way I see it, your guy got too close, and it scared the hell out of Graham, and he panicked and wiped him. Are you making my guy so scared he’s weaponizing his gifts? Just what the fuck are you doing behind my back? I’m trying to get a hold of him because I wanted him here for this, and he’s not answering his phone. What the fuck have you done with him? Making him so afraid he’s channeling Dolarhyde just to get away?

            “Call me back. Better yet, _Kade_ , come by my office. I’ll keep your blank slate of an agent in the lobby until you can get there. Maybe let him watch some Rugrats if they still air that on the TV. Until then, I’m going to clean this up. You’d better pray this was Dolarhyde trying to get Graham and instead got Jackson first, otherwise you’re in some shit. If you pushed Graham into weaponizing his empathy, I’ll have your head.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A special thanks to my lovely patrons (and my newest patrons): Frosty Lee, Heather Feather, Emily Elm, Sylarana, Matilda, Inky-Starlight, Duhaunt6, and Superlurk! <3
> 
> So sorry for the late update, but my recent promotion adds about 13+ hours per day worked to my schedule that was once used for writing/editing/planning! I'm going to try and get into this new groove and plan out a new schedule so that this continues to be consistent, and I appreciate your patience in the meantime! <3 You guys rock.

**Author's Note:**

> You can find me on Tumblr as Elfnerdherder --come say hello! 
> 
> A special thanks to my patrons: Sylarana, Duhaunt6, Mendacious Bean, Superlurk, Cecily, Evertonem, Inky-Starlight, Heather Feather, Laura G., and Dancy_85!


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